The CRM market is saturated with a variety of apps and suits promising to satisfy every business’s needs. However, the ensuing fierce competition between apps to offer more expansive solutions has obscured the line between CRMs and ERPS.

Although All-In-One solutions might, at first, seem like they would be the ideal choice, specialized CRMs or custom-built CRM ecosystems can provide an incredible competitive advantage for small and big businesses alike.

Focus on Relationships

It makes sense for a company to inquire on whether a particular CRM also automates processes like accounting, billing and inventory management.  It is important however to remember the feature key to any CRM’s success: the R.

Core to any CRM is the ability to manage relationships with leads of all kind. Consequently, a CRM app dedicated to the sales pipeline is bound to be better at valuing good customer relationships.

This also means that the dedicated CRM is more likely than All-in-One suits to research and develop features unique to the customer relationship aspect. A classic development mistake for apps is spreading out resources across multiple features incompatible with CRM’s principal purpose: Leads conversion and customer relationships.

Flexibility

A good CRM should seamlessly slot in with already existing workflows.  This is why All-in-One CRMs target the same standardized workflows that big enterprises adopt. Small and medium sized businesses, on the other hand, rely on flexible workflows which makes the rigidity of All-In-One CRM solutions an obstacle.

Moreover, the wide variety of apps available for businesses allows you to build your own ecosystem centered on the dedicated CRM app of your choice. You can tailor this ecosystem to mimic your current business workflows and keep adjusting it according to future needs.

Instead of the ready-made features that All-in-One suits offer like billing, accounting and project management, you get to decide which particular app solution matches your resources and fits best with your workflow.

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Apps like Zapier allow a number of CRMs to easily integrate with other apps and services without any technical knowledge of their APIs. Flexibility in terms of integration can be an incredibly cost-effective and efficient feature due to the fact that it creates a CRM ecosystems consisting of apps your employees are already familiar with.

Related: Did Santa Leave a CRM app?

Scalability

When keeping the scalability of your business in mind, it’s important to make sure that business processes will stay centered around the customer.  Since growth is driven by increasing customers and customer demand, it makes perfect sense to have a platform dedicated to ensuring smooth scalability.

With increasing customers comes the need for better leads management, sales forecasting tools and other analytics native to your CRM platform of choice. Although most all-in-one solutions also offer such tools, it can hard to dedicate sufficient attention to them when they’re also cluttered with non-CRM related features.

Price

The “all” in All-in-One CRM solutions comes with a hefty price. For CRM suits, subscription fees take into account all the features and services made available at the business’s disposal regardless of whether they are needed or not. If you are only in the market for a CRM solution only, investing on features you do not required yet is a waste of resources. As previously mentioned, dedicated CRMs are flexible enough to accommodate more functionalities when the need for them arises.

Focus

Low adoption rates are a constant concern for any business seeking to make a CRM app part of its workflows. In simpler terms, businesses need to make sure that whatever CRM app they choose will become an elemental part of their sales team routines. Often, purchased CRMs app go either under-used or have some of their features ignored.

Low adoption is a much bigger risk with All-in-One solutions when their features fall outside sale’s scope. In addition, these solutions also require more extensive and frequent training for the staff members using them, otherwise, unfamiliarity with the features often results in under-use.

On the other hand, dedicated CRMs make low adoption less of a concern thanks to the ease with which they fit in most businesses workflows intuitively. Moreover, training your staff to use them is easier and cheaper.

The ease of integration, previously discussed, of dedicated CRMs with other solutions that staff members are familiar with guarantees no interruptions in your business workflows to deal with the logistics of adopting a CRM app.

At Teamgate, we remain committed to offering a CRM app dedicated to the sales pipeline and to customer relationships. Features such as Sales Funnel and Sales Forecasting reflect our commitment to our app’s purpose: Customer relationship.

Related: Old vs. New CRM