Imagine managing thousands of potential and current customers using spreadsheets and manual records? What if your hard drive dies and you suddenly lose your entire customer base? That’s why businesses need Customer Relationship Management software. Furthermore, many opt for a custom CRM that suits all their unique business processes. However, such a CRM may come at a price. You can read on to find out about custom CRM development costs. We based our data on average development prices listed and available publicly on the Internet.
This article covers the following topics:
The Analysis of Custom CRM Development Costs
The price of building a custom CRM system depends on various factors. Some of them are complexity, the number of necessary business processes, or the time you wish to spend on these services. To get to the bottom of it, we will analyze this process from the start.
The five key development stages when building your custom CRM system are:
- Listing your goals and requirements
- Determining your desired technical specifications
- Designing
- Testing
- Launching and monitoring
In the first step, you need to plan your personal goals and choose what kind of CRM software you want to develop. You have four main options:
- Operational CRM: It focuses on marketing, sales, service automation, and meeting short-term objectives.
- Analytical CRM: It analyzes customer data provided by the operational CRM to determine customer behavior.
- Collaborative CRM: It helps synchronize communication with customers across emails, phone calls, websites, and social networks.
- Strategic CRM: It gathers customer data in a knowledge base to help support long-term customer relationships.
All these types are interconnected, especially in the case of an enterprise CRM system. It comprises multiple modules that address specific issues for each business process. There are three such modules: sales, marketing, and customer support. The final custom CRM development costs will depend on the types of technical functionalities you want to include. Let’s look at every department individually.
Sales
Sales automation makes the sales team’s work productive and helps them close more deals with new or existing clients. Any modern sales module in CRM systems needs tools for automating work on managing customer data, collecting and analyzing the market, and planning future sales. Therefore, it usually includes Accounts, Leads, Contacts, Opportunities, and several other tabs in the user interface.
Account and Lead Management
The core features in CRM for sales are account management and lead management. The sales team uses this tool to process customer data, track all customer life stages, and forecast their behavior. Thus, it might sort information about users by their name, phone number, email, rating, etc. You can see all this functionality located across several tabs. Among the most popular ones are sales automation, contact center, shared calendars, and lead routing tools. Lead routing is especially crucial for companies that have many incoming leads. It allows to set up different lead distribution rules, such as potential deal size, lead source, or a history of interactions with the lead.
The cost of this section with said essential functions starts from 35,000 dollars.
Sales Analytics
Sales representatives use this tool to configure dashboards and diagrams so they can view sales trends. You usually work with monitoring panels and visualization to divide people into segments and groups depending on your needs. Other features you might also want to implement are direct communication and uploading data from spreadsheets and external databases. With direct contact via emailing or commenting, managers can always be up to date about statistics.
Costs of sales analytics can add up to 8,000 dollars or even higher.
Sales Planning
Sales managers have to form sales plans based on data the marketing department provides. Additionally, they need access to analytics and sales history. You can opt to replace planning using spreadsheets with an advanced calendar. In this calendar, the sales team could set new goals, add detailed plans, describe strategies, leave notes, and assign a responsible team member to each objective.
To implement this section of the sales module, you would need to reserve at least 8,000 dollars in your budget.
Marketing
CRM obtains leads from different marketing campaigns and stores their data. Once you have it gathered in one place, you can use it in your marketing efforts. Marketing module is necessary if you want to have control, automation of management, and the ability to track this information. It allows you to think through viable marketing strategies based on the collected data.
Campaign Management
Marketing campaign management tools can make your marketing efforts better, more targeted, and more personalized. Most businesses launch marketing campaigns to get potential buyers thinking about a specific problem their products or services can solve. These tools are useful for creating tasks and events, working with financial issues, and assigning each team member to a particular task.
Costs of campaign management tools most often add up to 10,000 dollars.
Marketing Analytics
These tools make it possible to view what campaigns were the most successful, who provided the best Return on Investment (ROI), and what trends appeared during these campaigns. So, you will know with whom it is better to work. As with sales analytics tools, marketing analytics tools should provide a drag-and-drop interface. It will allow marketers to add new data to charts and view it in real-time.
Marketing analytics’ costs vary, but you can expect an amount of around 8,000 dollars and more.
Client Segmentation
You will want your marketers to segment clients and identify the most profitable groups of customers. For example, marketers should be able to group customers based on their behavior. For this functionality, you will generally use charts. Marketers should scrutinize, filter, and modify them.
The approximate costs of these tools are likely to be in the 8,000–9,000 dollars range.
Customer Support
To keep customers and not lose their trust, you need a support module. With it, you can show your concern for each customer while automating the process. All interactions with clients via email, phone calls, tickets, and messages on social networks you register in the database. That way, you can access the necessary information easily and quickly.
Agent Console and Reference Service
Support agents need a central interface to see customers’ requests via different channels, such as email, chat, tweets, and messages. This is one of the main features that send incoming inquiries to the appropriate specialists. It shows them all the necessary information and distributes the requests according to the importance and time of receipt.
The price you need to pay for these services is a minimum of 25,000 dollars.
Service Analytics
A service module has several functions. It must gather statistics about client requests, record problems, and track how quickly customer support representatives resolved those issues. This module’s analytical part will compile and organize information from all kinds of sources: tickets, phone calls, emails, and social media channels.
When it comes to service analytics’ cost, it starts from 8,000 dollars.
Knowledge Base
This is where you will store information about your business’s products and services. A knowledge base contains reference materials, How-To guides, specifications, use cases, and much more. Any support specialist should have access to read, edit, and publish the information there.
The usual price you can expect for implementing this feature is 5,000 dollars or more.
The Result
So, how much does the actual custom CRM development cost? There can be no definitive answer to this question. But according to the information we’ve provided so far, it’s possible to calculate an approximate value. Here is the overview for every module:
- Sales: 51,000 dollars
- Marketing: 26,000 dollars
- Customer support: 38,000 dollars
Therefore, the cost of your custom CRM is likely to start with 115,000 dollars. Keep in mind that we got these net values using the minimum prices for each category. The rates depend on many factors, including the number of features, the project’s relative difficulty, cost of deployment, support, and your web development company of choice.
The Cost of Building vs. Buying a CRM System
The custom CRM development costs initially put off most businesses, especially startups and small companies. While the price tag certainly seems hefty, you will develop your CRM system continuously. Hence, you will spread your investment over a three to ten years time span.
All of the pre-built CRM systems and cloud services come with a price per user. Meaning, the larger your team grows, the more you’ll be forced to pay on a required basis. If you want to unlock additional features and custom modules, you may face even more monthly payments. Furthermore, your sales team will probably use the product every day. Yet, your marketing team may need to have occasional access to the system as well. Even if they don’t use it quite often, you will still have to pay the full price. You can restrict the access, but then the overall company efficiency and productivity might suffer. For the same amount of money, your firm could have already built a robust, custom CRM system. It would require far less investments in maintenance and possible tech support.
Hiring a developer is not the only way to get a custom database created for you. You can also choose to build it on a no-code application development platform, such as Kohezion. The main advantage of this approach is that you don’t have to pay for relational database functionality. It already comes with the platform. You just need to create an account, and you’re set to customize it. You can do this without having any previous coding experience. But if you do need help, there are available professional services. Online database software subscriptions with Kohezion start at $50 per user yearly. Therefore, it is far less expensive than the usual off-the-shelf enterprise software subscription.
Conclusion
We hope this article has helped you get the gist of an average CRM system development cost. You will be provided with the exact price when you determine your requirements and features needed. It’s essential that you make a plan in advance, one for the process of building a CRM software and one for the budget. According to our calculations, you should be set with at least 115,000 dollars.
Building a custom CRM may initially seem like an unnecessary and costly investment. However, the charges are usually justified when revived in the long-term perspective. If you do the evaluation and selection process carefully, you can avoid paying for features that you might not need or a product that does not meet all your requirements.
If an already made CRM solution meets your requirements by less than 50%, our advice is to either:
- Develop a custom solution for your business.
- Give up specific conditions, which are low in terms of importance.
- Consider upgrading an existing software with certain custom code elements.
