Bespoke CRM software
Most CRM packages were designed for a sales team selling a subscription. If you quote, schedule, service and invoice instead, you end up bending your business to fit the software.
A CRM is only worth having if it is the easiest place to put information. The moment it is slower than a spreadsheet, people stop feeding it, and within a few months the data is wrong in a way nobody trusts.
That is usually not a discipline problem. It is a fit problem.
Where packages struggle
Off-the-shelf CRM assumes a shape: a lead arrives, moves through stages, becomes a closed deal, and the relationship largely ends there.
Plenty of businesses do not work that way. A merchant has customers who reorder for twenty years. A service firm has contracts, sites and equipment histories. An engineering business quotes work that has never been quoted before, and the quote is the hard part.
When the package cannot hold that, it gets held somewhere else. A spreadsheet, a shared mailbox, somebody’s head. Then there are two systems and neither is complete.
What we do instead
We build the record around how your business actually works, and we connect it to the things either side of it: the accounts package, the inbox, the job sheet, the stock system.
You also own the relationship with the people who built it. It is maintained and extended by the same team that looks after your IT, and the system is documented and in our source control rather than on one developer’s machine.
When to buy instead
Sometimes a package is clearly right, and we would rather say so than sell you a project. If your sales process is conventional and the main need is recording activity, buy something. We use a CRM package ourselves for exactly that reason.
The conversation worth having is which of those two you are.
What is included
What you get
Your sales process, not a generic one
Stages that match how work actually comes in, instead of the pipeline a software company imagined.
Quoting
Quotes built from your own pricing, sent, tracked and turned into an order without being retyped.
One customer record
Contacts, sites, equipment, history and correspondence in one place rather than four.
Jobs and scheduling
What is booked, who is doing it and what happened last time, where the sales side can see it.
Renewals and recurring work
Contracts, service intervals and renewal dates that prompt somebody instead of being noticed late.
Email and calendar
Correspondence attached to the customer automatically, so the record is complete without anyone filing it.
Reporting that means something
Value by customer, by product, by engineer, by anything you actually manage against.
Accounts integration
Orders and invoices passed to your accounts package rather than keyed in twice.
How we work
What working with us looks like
- 1
Follow a real enquiry
We take one from first contact to invoice and write down every step, including the ones nobody has documented.
- 2
Say whether to build or buy
If a package fits, we will tell you. We use one ourselves.
- 3
Scope it
A written scope and a fixed price, clear about what is in and what is not.
- 4
Build, test and move the data
You test with your own customers and history. Migration includes the tidy up, which is where duplicates surface.
No obligation
Talk it through first
Tell us how work comes in and what you do with it. We will tell you whether this is a build or a package.
Common questions
Why not just buy a CRM?
Often that is the right answer, and we will say so. We use a CRM package ourselves rather than one we wrote. Building makes sense when the way you quote, schedule or price is the thing that makes you money and no package will do it without workarounds.
Can it talk to our accounts package?
In most cases, yes. Passing orders and invoices across instead of rekeying them is one of the most common reasons businesses ask us for this.
What happens to the data we already have?
We migrate it from wherever it lives now, including spreadsheets and mailboxes. Part of that job is merging duplicates, which is usually the point a business finds out how many versions of the same customer it has.
Will our team actually use it?
They will if it is quicker than what they do now. That is the test we design against, and it is the reason we watch the job being done before we write anything.
Get in touch
Tell us what is not working
Send us a line about your setup and we will come back with what we would actually do about it. No sales pitch, no obligation.
Or call 01482 586 550 or email info@selectgroup.co.uk.
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