Create a Custom CRM: Your Complete Guide

If you’re looking to grow your business, then having the right customer relationship management (CRM) software is essential. CRM keeps records of your customers, potential customers, sales tasks, actions that require follow-up, and much more. Most sales reps live by their contact data---it can be motivating with target goals and daily tasks, and keeps indispensable information handy to make sales. Sales is the lifeblood of a company, so it’s understandable why there are so many CRM software options to choose from.

As you research a CRM solution for your business, keep in mind that the best CRMs aren’t just about sales teams. Their real benefit is being able to create the custom CRM solution that works best for your entire company, bringing everyone together around your data to create a single view of your customer.

This means CRM can also be used to help businesses make informed, data-driven decisions across all departments: sales, service, marketing, commerce, and more. When all aspects of the business are operating around the same updated information, productivity, customer satisfaction, and revenue increases.

Though choosing the right technology is important, building a successful CRM system is also about having a plan in place. From a business perspective, a software product should help you actualize your vision. With that framework in mind, it’s important to craft a vision statement. Maybe you want to revolutionize customer service in your industry, or maybe you simply want to be the market leader in your region. Whatever your vision is, define it, share it with the entire organization, and let it guide your strategy.

Having a clear, actionable strategy is what will make your vision a reality. If your vision is to become the market leader in your region, you must decide if your strategy is to offer more products, compete on price or offer the best customer service in the industry. Customer relationship management software can help keep measuring those metrics. Daily tasks should then align with the corporate vision while CRM helps create and track tasks, as well as measure their progress.

Most businesses start with a smaller version of a CRM system, designed to: keep track of contacts, customers, opportunities, and orders. If you’re considering CRM for a small business, consider that you’ll need a solution that is scalable. As your business grows, your CRM should grow with you. That’s one advantage of Salesforce CRM, options and CRM features that fit businesses of all sizes and industries. As you grow and upgrade your capabilities, the information in your CRM program can come with you.

Robust solutions have a lot of features, which is great if your team will use them all. If not, you’ll likely end up paying for a lot of capabilities that you won’t use. On the other side of the spectrum is a completely customized CRM, which can be built by contracting with a software development team, or hiring one on staff. This is a great way to get exactly what you need, but could be costly and take time from your IT department's other tasks.

Thankfully, there is a middle ground: use a CRM system that has many of the features you need, plus allows you to add on custom apps. With AppExchange, there are hundreds of pre-built apps to integrate into your system. If you need more customized apps, Salesforce partners or your own programmers can build them for you. The sky’s the limit when it comes to customizing Salesforce CRM.

Apps are self-contained computer program applications designed to perform specific tasks. Like all computer software, apps are written on development platforms, larger software where smaller programs can be designed. To create apps, you’ll need a mobile application development platform, like Salesforce, where the instructions for the app’s computing takes place. Information is collected and the app’s program gives instructions about what to do with the information.

Until recently, you also needed extensive development knowledge to create apps. However, platforms such as Salesforce App Cloud require no coding knowledge, and allows users to quickly create custom CRM apps that help run every part of your business. Because the platform is already in place, time and resources don’t need to be spent developing and maintaining the platform to support your custom CRM apps.

Many companies provide app design platforms for a monthly subscription. Called Platform as a Service, or PaaS, these providers offer a platform that supports custom app development. Salesforce App Cloud provides the platform to create and support custom CRM apps. Because it is cloud-based, you can create apps quickly without worrying about maintaining the development platform or infrastructure.

Cloud-based software platforms are also more reliable than internal systems. Creating custom CRM apps allows you to focus on what’s most important: making your business run as smoothly as possible.

Streamlining more processes ultimately allows for better customer service and satisfaction, and increases your revenue. Businesses realize the need for CRM because they see the importance of focusing on the customer. But CRM extends across every department, not just sales. When customizing your CRM program, it’s important to realize that CRM is a strategy to use across your entire organization, which is why you should use it to build apps for every team.

There are many IT tasks that can be automated, freeing up your team to take care of more complicated issues. Software development apps help by tracking every story, so apps can be built faster for every department. Other types of IT apps can be used for quality control, project management, software licensing tracking, patent submission tracking, and help desk.

Apps can help your marketing department become more efficient. Creating project apps, channel management apps, and production scheduling apps help keep tabs on projects, deadlines, and contacts in the ad production process. You can also build apps to organize your marketing content in one place, making it easy to access up-to-date marketing assets.

Many human resource responsibilities can be automated, allowing specialists to focus on employees rather than tasks. Employee onboarding and learning apps can automate training and frequently asked questions. A vacation time tracker can help employees track their time off and get fast approvals. A recruiting app keeps track of interactions throughout the hiring process.

Financial processes that require several steps and tedious tracking can be automated through apps. You can create apps to create new customer accounts from any device, streamlining the process for sales and finance departments. A PO tracker can allow purchase orders to be followed from start to finish while multi-project setup and fulfillment can be automated through the commercial onboarding apps.

Apps can be linked to your enterprise resource planning (ERP) program, allowing for anyone in the company to easily access information, and a supply chain app allows streamlining of supplier relations.