Choosing a CRM for a small sales team

Most CRM advice is written for companies with a sales operations function. If you are five people and one of you is also the founder, almost none of it applies. The failure mode for a small team is not choosing the wrong features; it is choosing a system nobody keeps up to date.

The two questions that predict everything

First: how long does it take to log a call and move a deal forward? If the answer is more than a few seconds, it will not happen on a busy day, and a CRM that is not current is worse than a spreadsheet because people trust it.

Second: what happens when somebody leaves? If the pipeline lives in one person’s head and the CRM only has the deals they remembered to enter, you do not have a CRM. You have a filing cabinet with gaps.

Features you can safely ignore at your size

• Territory management. You are not big enough to have territories.
• Lead scoring models with a dozen weighted inputs. Your reps know which leads are good; the model is guessing.
• Approval workflows for quotes. Walk over and ask.
• Anything that requires an implementation partner. If it needs a consultant to set up, it needs one to change.

What is worth paying for

Import that works. You will move data in at least twice — once when you start, once when you clean it up six months later — and a bad importer turns both into a week.

Somewhere for the phone to live. For a team where calling matters, having the dialer and the record in one place removes the single largest source of missing data: the call that happened but never got written down.

An export button you have tested. Not because you plan to leave, but because a system you cannot leave is a system that can raise its price without consequence.

On price

Per-user pricing is normal and fine. What is worth reading carefully is what happens at the boundaries: what a seat costs mid-month, whether the annual discount locks you in, and which features sit behind a tier you will hit within a year. The cheapest plan that you will outgrow in four months is not the cheapest plan.