Four Ways You Can Offer Your Own CRM

You know it’s a smart move to offer your own CRM to your small business customers. It will increase customer loyalty and satisfaction and increase revenues for you. It’s a win for everyone!

Offering your own CRM has 3 major benefits:

1. You can start promoting YOUR brand instead another CRM’s brand. 
2. You can now offer your customers a complete solution, making you more sticky.
3. You will create a new, recurring revenue stream for your company.

But where do you start? What are your options? 

Here are four ways you can do this:

Option #1: Build Your Own CRM

Building your own CRM is a big decision, but it’s the right decision for some. For others it’s not such a great option.  

If you have programmers on staff with the time and talent then this might be a good idea for you. When you build your own CRM and marketing automation tools, you have complete control of the CRM feature set and the user experience. You can make the product fit your needs perfectly. 

While this is a great option for some, it’s not a great option for most. Consider this:

Building your own CRM will take your developers off of your own product and turn their focus on something that may not be your core business. Additionally, they are not just going to build it, they are going to maintain it and keep it fresh and up-to-date… FOREVER. This is not Microsoft Word you are building, this is a living breathing, ever-evolving product.

Also, can you afford to wait several months (or years) before your CRM is ready to go? It will take around eight to eighteen months to build a basic CRM from start to finish. 

There might be better options for you… keep reading. 

Option #2: Hire Someone to Build It for You

This is a bad idea, no matter how you slice it. There is no scenario, where outsourcing the build of a CRM is a good idea. You will throw endless amounts of cash at it, it will take years to complete, and it will absolutely suck once it’s done – if it ever gets done.

You may think you can hire cheap developers to build this, and if you talk to these developers, they will tell you they can easily do it. But if you go down this road, you will be kicking yourself for years to come.

The folks who have gone this route will tell you this:

• The cost was way higher than originally quoted.
• It took the programmer(s) three times as long as they said it would take.
• The product still doesn’t work after X number of months (or years).
• I have wasted so much time and energy on this.
• This was a really dumb idea.
  

Option #3: White Label a CRM

White Labeling a CRM is a smart idea if you want most of the benefits of building it yourself, without all the headaches. 

When you white label a CRM you take a proven and reliable product and put your logo and branding on it. Then you load it up with your email templates, campaigns, landing pages and other content. Then you price it however you want to, and sell it as your own. 

While you won’t get the absolutely perfect product you have in mind, there are several benefits to going the White Label route:

1. You are able to get to market quickly. Like in a matter of days. 
2. You have a team of developers that are always focused on making your CRM better. They do the bug fixes, the hosting, and they make sure the product is up-to-date and relevant.
3. You don’t have to worry or wonder if the product will be accepted or even work for that matter.

Getting started with a White Label CRM is a pretty straightforward process. You can have your product built in two to three weeks, then you load your content and you are ready to go to market. Most companies can start selling their own branded White Label CRM within 30 days.

Option #4: Resell an Established CRM

This is a cheap and easy way to go. There is little or no upfront investment and no learning curve for you.

Do you really need to have your brand out there? Would it be OK if you had a co-branded product and let someone else do the billing and support? 

Consider becoming an affiliate for another CRM. You won’t get all the benefits of having your own solution, but this is another way to get started.

Conclusion

You know you need to offer a CRM but there are different ways to approach this. Building it yourself is the best way to go if all the stars are aligned, but there are also other options to do it cheaper and faster.