Guide
How to choose a CRM for a UK small business
Most UK small businesses should buy a CRM rather than build one, and most CRM projects that fail were decided on features rather than on adoption. This guide ranks the seven criteria that actually determine whether a CRM works, sets out what per-user pricing costs over five years, and describes the cases where the honest answer is that you do not need a CRM at all.
By James 11 min read
Start here: do you need a CRM at all?
A CRM is worth having when you have more prospects in flight than one person can hold in their head, when more than one person needs to know the state of a relationship, or when work is being lost because nobody followed up. If none of those apply, a well-kept spreadsheet and a calendar are a legitimate answer and considerably cheaper.
The clearest signal that you do need one is a specific, recurring failure: a quote that went unchased for three weeks, a customer contacted twice by two different people, or a salesperson leaving and taking the only record of their pipeline with them. Those are CRM problems.
The clearest signal that you do not is a vague sense that the business should be more organised. That is a real feeling and a CRM will not fix it, because the tool does not create the discipline. It records it.
Criterion 1: will the people who have to use it actually use it?
This decides more CRM outcomes than every other criterion combined, and it is the one weighted least in most selection processes.
A CRM only works if the people doing the selling keep it current, and they will only keep it current if it is faster than the alternative for them personally. If updating a record after a call takes ninety seconds, it happens. If it takes five minutes and eleven fields, it happens on a Friday afternoon from memory, which produces data nobody should act on.
So run the trial with the people who will use it, on real deals, for a fortnight, before deciding anything. A demonstration given by a vendor to a manager tells you nothing about this.
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Criterion 2: does it hold the records your business actually has?
Standard CRMs are built around a contact at a company. That fits professional services well and fits a great many other businesses badly.
If your work attaches to a property, a vehicle, a site, an installation or a piece of equipment, check specifically how the product handles that before committing. Forcing an address into a contact field works until you have four addresses for one customer and no way to attach a job to the right one.
This is the single most common reason a small business outgrows an off-the-shelf CRM, and it is entirely predictable at the selection stage if anybody asks the question.
Criterion 3: what does it cost at the headcount you will have in three years?
Per-user pricing is the standard model and it is easy to underestimate because the monthly figure looks small. Ten users at £40 a month is £480 a month, £5,760 a year, and close to £29,000 over five years. Twenty users doubles it, and the value delivered rarely doubles with it.
Do the sum at the headcount you expect rather than the one you have. Then add the tier upgrade you will need for the feature you have already identified as essential, the integrations that are charged separately, and the onboarding fee.
None of that makes subscriptions bad value. It makes them a real number that should be compared against alternatives rather than treated as a rounding error.
The full arithmetic on buying against building is in the off-the-shelf against custom comparison.
Criterion 4: can you get your data out?
Before you put five years of customer history into a system, establish how you would get it out. Ask for an export of everything, including notes, attachments and history, not just a contact list.
A product that exports contacts but not the conversation history is holding the part that actually matters. That is a switching cost disguised as a feature gap, and it is worth knowing about before you are three years in.
Criterion 5: does it connect to what you already run?
A CRM that does not talk to your accounts package, your website enquiry form and your calendar becomes another place to type things. That is worse than no CRM, because it adds work while promising to remove it.
Check the specific connections you need rather than the length of the integrations list. A product with four hundred integrations and none to your accounting package is not integrated for you.
Where a native connection does not exist, an integration is usually straightforward to build and far cheaper than changing either system. That is worth pricing before ruling a product out.
More on that in our page about connecting the systems you already run.
Criterion 6: does it match how you actually sell?
Pipeline stages should describe what happens in your business, not a generic funnel. If your work goes enquiry, survey, quote, approval, schedule, install, sign-off, then a CRM offering lead, opportunity, closed will be fought against from the first week.
Most products allow custom stages. Check how far that customisation goes and whether it survives an upgrade, because heavy configuration that breaks on every release is its own kind of trap.
Criterion 7: who owns it internally?
A CRM with no internal owner drifts within six months. Records go stale, stages stop meaning anything, and within a year the honest answer to "what is in the pipeline" is that nobody knows.
Somebody has to be responsible for keeping it true, and that person needs the authority to insist. This is not a software criterion and it is the reason most implementations succeed or fail, which is why it is on the list.
The seven criteria, ranked by how often they decide the outcome
| Rank | Criterion | How it usually fails |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Will the users actually use it | Updating a record is slower than not bothering |
| 2 | Does it hold your record structure | Sites, vehicles or properties forced into contact fields |
| 3 | Cost at future headcount | Per-user pricing grows faster than the value |
| 4 | Can you export everything | Contacts export, conversation history does not |
| 5 | Connections to what you run | Long integration list, nothing to your accounts package |
| 6 | Matches how you sell | Generic stages fought against from week one |
| 7 | Internal ownership | Nobody responsible, records stale within six months |
When a custom CRM is genuinely the right answer
Rarely, and the honest test is whether you can name the specific thing an off-the-shelf product will not do. If you cannot, the problem is configuration, training or adoption, and all three are far cheaper to fix than a build.
Where a build earns its place is when the record structure genuinely does not fit, when quoting depends on a calculation nobody else performs, when per-user pricing has grown past the value at your headcount, or when a standard product is being held in shape by three integrations and a spreadsheet. That last one is the most common and the least recognised, because by then you already have a custom system and you are also paying a licence for it.
The honest counter-argument to building is flexibility. A product you can leave is worth something, and a system you own is a commitment. That is a real trade-off rather than a rhetorical one.
We set out our own position on that under when a custom CRM is warranted.
How to run a trial that tells you something
Almost every CRM offers a free trial and almost every trial is wasted, because it is run by whoever is evaluating rather than by whoever will use the system, on invented data, for a week.
A trial worth running has four properties. It uses real deals, currently in flight, with real names and real values, because invented data hides exactly the record-structure problems you are trying to surface. It is run by the people who will have to keep it current, not by a manager. It lasts a fortnight rather than a few days, because the first three days of any product feel promising. And it has a written question to answer at the end: did updating a record after a call take under a minute, and did anybody stop bothering.
Run the same trial on two products rather than five. Comparing two properly is far more useful than sampling five superficially, and the shortlist should have been narrowed by the seven criteria before any trial starts.
One further thing worth doing during the trial: import a realistic slice of your existing data rather than starting empty. Most of the pain in a CRM migration shows up in the records that never fitted the old system cleanly, and finding those during a trial is considerably cheaper than finding them during a rollout.
Why this guide does not rank named products
A ranked list of named CRMs is what this search usually returns, and it is the format that performs. We are not writing one, for two reasons.
The first is that we have not run most of them for clients, and ranking products we have not operated would be an opinion presented as an assessment. The second is that any such list is out of date within a release cycle, and a guide that is wrong in eighteen months is worse than one that is general.
Ranking the criteria is the part that stays true, and it is the part a buyer actually has to decide. Once you know which of the seven matter most in your business, shortlisting products is straightforward and the reviews already available will do it better than we could.
Frequently asked questions
If the answer is not here, ask us. You will get a straight one, from someone who does the work.
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What is the best CRM for a UK small business?
There is no single answer, and any guide that gives one is ranking products rather than fit. The decision is made on seven criteria: whether the users will actually use it, whether it holds your record structure, cost at future headcount, data export, integrations, whether it matches how you sell, and who owns it internally.
How much should a small business pay for a CRM?
Per-user pricing typically runs from £15 to £70 per user per month in the UK. Do the sum at the headcount you expect in three years rather than today: ten users at £40 is close to £29,000 over five years, and that figure should be compared against alternatives rather than treated as small.
Do we need a CRM at all?
You need one when more prospects are in flight than one person can hold in their head, when more than one person needs to know the state of a relationship, or when work is being lost to missed follow-up. A vague sense that the business should be more organised is not a CRM problem, because the tool records discipline rather than creating it.
Why do CRM implementations fail?
Almost always on adoption rather than on software. If updating a record after a call takes five minutes and eleven fields, it gets done on a Friday from memory. Run any trial with the people who will actually use it, on real deals, for a fortnight before deciding.
When should we build a CRM instead of buying one?
When you can name the specific thing off-the-shelf will not do: a record structure that does not fit, a quoting calculation nobody else performs, per-user pricing that has outgrown the value, or a product already held in shape by three integrations and a spreadsheet. Otherwise, buy.
Can we move our data if we change CRM later?
Establish that before you commit rather than afterwards. Ask for an export of everything including notes, attachments and conversation history, not just a contact list. A product that exports contacts but not history is holding the part that actually matters.