How Much Does A CRM System Cost To Set-up and Run?

‘A CRM is difficult to put a price on’ (Expert Market).

When it comes to pricing up your CRM, it depends on how big your building products business is right now, and how you’re looking to scale. It varies on the specific functions you’re looking for. Adding extra features, such as marketing automation, sales and contact points – will naturally be more expensive.

However, the benefits you’ll get from this are valuable, you’re able to scale and everybody in your construction company can have an input. This blog aims to help make this decision easier for you. We will go through 4 important factors: cost of acquisition, data migration, implementation, and user training.

81% of the construction leaders interviewed within the Construction Front Line Survey shared their expectations to enact or put in place initiatives to improve their construction businesses digitally in the following 12 months. With that 12-month deadline quickly approaching, it becomes clear that the construction industry is finally catching up with digital innovation.

Cost Of Acquisition

Here, we’re referring to the cost of your system. You’re typically looking at paying a monthly fee and a fee for each licence or user. According to G2 Crowd’s CRM Software Research, there are 601 available, in this blog, we will uncover 4 popular systems.

These are HubSpot, Zoho, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics

Did I hear “free”?

Yes, you did!

HubSpot and Zoho both offer free CRM platforms.

HubSpot

HubSpot follows the philosophy ‘and it’s 100% free forever’. Offering security, especially if you’re sceptical initially.

Just some of the tools included in the free version of HubSpot are:

• Reporting dashboard
• Company insights
• Tracking deals
• Email building and tracking
• Meeting scheduling
• A website live chat

Get full visibility into your sales pipeline in real-time.

With detailed reports on sales activity, productivity, and individual performance, you’ll be able to visually see your team’s performance straight away.

Best of all, HubSpot can store up to 1,000,000 contacts. The first 1000 contacts are free, after this there are additional costs for every 1000 contacts.

With the mid-range and advanced version of HubSpot, you can add inbound marketing features to drive your SEO, create landing pages, sophisticated analytics, and reports.

HubSpot offer a range of packages for Marketing, Sales and Customer Services. You can create your own bundles to suit your building product business.

HubSpot most definitely does the hard work for you.

I’m new to HubSpot and immediately I know how to make CTA’s, landing pages and optimise SEO. It’s easy and simple to use, something I recommend all businesses to have.

Zoho

Zoho offers three free users for a CRM system. Stating it is ‘rich in features, free in cost.’

Within this deal, your construction company can have data on leads, deals, contact management, tasks, events, multichannel marketing, and integrations to other Zoho apps.

For over 3 contacts, you will have to use their paid version of a CRM

With Zoho, you can manage and organise data in a way to help you drive sales and revenue. You can also build lasting relationships with your leads and customers and say goodbye to your chunky spreadsheets.

The advanced option will allow you to get improved analytics to see how your company is performing.

Salesforce

Salesforce offers a wide variety of CRM types and systems to meet your needs, including Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, and Analytics Cloud.

With an advanced version of Salesforce, your capabilities include lead management, marketing automation and contact management. 

Microsoft Dynamics

‘We will find the right partner for you,’ Microsoft Dynamics can add value as they can foster leads with multichannel campaigns.

By connecting LinkedIn, you can make better decisions with real-time data and adapt quickly with automation with AI.

Both Salesforce and Microsoft have the enterprise-level resources accessible to use AI tools that help make your building product sales and service tools smoother.

Data Migration

Data Migration involves migrating your data onto your new CRM system. This can be either from a spreadsheet or from a different CRM system. This is key for your CRM success because data migration relies on clean, high-quality data that brings benefits to your contacts and staff.

You can make your life easier and let an experienced company do your data migration for you. Ensuring you don’t lose any data and you have an up-to-date CRM system. The costings can range depending on the quantity and quality of your data.

Don’t panic, here at Insynth we can help you migrate your data. We’re an experienced construction agency, so, we can help keep your buildings products business up-to-scratch.

Implementation

A successful CRM implementation process is one of the trickiest tasks that modern businesses face. This is the process of fully executing your new CRM system to drive your construction company for efficiency and to become smarter when generating leads.

According to Harvard Business Law, the key to effective implementation is leadership, strategic planning, clear performance measures and a coordinated programme. In this process, recognise if there are areas you want to customise your CRM systems. Do you want to add users? Add more contacts?

Here, you can create pipelines and deal stages and define the steps you want your CRM systems to take to nurture these leads. Our experience and expertise in the implementation of HubSpot and other CRM systems over the last 30 years give us great insight into how to utilise it quickly and successfully.

We can support or manage your implementation project to get you live and up to speed as quickly as possible.

User Training

Starting things off with a good training session is crucial, to keep up to date with your system and making sure you’re using it correctly. 

Your team need to learn the new system they’re going to adopt.  When it’s your time to “go live”, you need to have the “must-do” processes clearly identified for your user’s roles.

Salesforce offers training software to their end-users, so users are learning and retaining what they need to know with their CRM system. This is done face-to-face, online and via workshops.

The costs for a Salesforce certification range from £150 all the way up to £4700. The £4700 tag is only for one certification: Salesforce Certified Technical Architect.

Zoho offers virtual classes you can attend

Zoho also offers face-to-face talks in big cities and training for administrators, developers, sales reps and sales managers, for all users of a CRM system.

These can range from £40 - £400 per ticket depending on the length of the training.

Microsoft Dynamics offer training programmes with eLearning and certifications. There are options to learn about Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 operations.

Training can also be charged as a one-off session. As an example, the rate for a full-day course is £895 plus VAT.

HubSpot offers free online courses that are certified via HubSpot Academy.

These courses and certificates are well recognised. Although these are free, some of them require paid tools. Such as, the Content Marketing Certification requires activities you need to complete to become certified.

The good news is - the certifications themselves, don’t require a cost.

In my personal experiences, I’ve found the training on HubSpot useful and effective in helping me gather knowledge, so I know how to use HubSpot’s CRM correctly.

I love learning, and the things I’ve learnt from HubSpot’s online courses have definitely broadened my expertise to become a better marketer.

choosing your CRM

Once you have the prices of each CRMs you'll need to decide which one will be best for your business by comparing each CRM. The most expensive systems won't automatically provide the best results, you need to take into account all of the features the CRM systems provide. ask yourself. How much am I willing to pay for extra tools? Do I need to pay for the full version now or can I wait until my budget increases?"

If you're a small business look at what CRMs offer for free, and which tools you would be willing to invest in the future. don't worry about racing ahead trying to lock everything at the start of your set-up, as your business grows so will your budget and you can invest more of it into your CRM. Using free versions also gives you the flexibility to change systems if your first pick isn't the perfect fit for your business.

And if you're still undecided, drop them an email to answer those last wriggling questions you want answers to. This will also be perfect in knowing how your possible system deals with customer service, how fast do they respond? what solutions do they offer? can they make any deals for you? you don't want to invest your businesses money into bad customer service.

Conclusion

With various costings, a CRM system can be valuable to your building product company, drive your construction company to become efficient and reduce your repetitive tasks.

Here at Insynth, we’re HubSpot partners and have helped many building product companies successfully integrate HubSpot CRM, bringing them insights into their marketing and sales activities and boosting their growth plans.

If you need to talk about adopting or implementing a CRM system, or you want more information, get in touch with us we are more than happy to help.

With implementation, we’ll provide you with all the skills and knowledge you need to manage HubSpot effectively, and we will support you beyond your live date.

If you found the information in this post insightful, we recommend you look into some of the most popular articles in the Insynth Blog regarding lead generation! Our favourites are: 

• The 7 Pillars of Lead Generation 

• How Sales and Marketing Alignment Can Drive Lead Generation 
• What Is Lead Nurturing? 
• Have Your Got The Right Tools For Lead Generation? 

About Insynth

At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.

We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.

As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.

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