How Much Does a Custom CRM Development Cost?

The Analysis of Custom CRM Development Costs

The price of building a custom CRM system depends on various factors. Some 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:

1. Listing your goals and requirements
2. Determining your desired technical specifications
3. Designing
4. Testing
5. Launching and monitoring

The first step is planning and goal setting in order to define 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 behaviour.
• 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 of these CRMs are interconnected, especially in the case of an enterprise CRM system. Enterprise CRMs combine 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 module individually.

Sales

Sales automation tool makes the sales team more 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, the user interface usually includes Accounts, Leads, Contacts, Opportunities, and several other tabs.

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 behaviour. 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 you 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 essential functions starts at $35,000 USD.

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. 

Cost of sales analytics can add up to $8,000 USD. 

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 set aside at least $8,000 dollars in your budget.

Marketing

A CRM obtains leads from different marketing campaigns and stores its data. Once you have it centralized in one place, you can use it in your marketing efforts. A 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 helpful in creating tasks and events, working with financial issues, and assigning each team member to a particular task. 

The costs of campaign management tools often add up to $10,000 USD.

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 it to be at least $8,000 USD.

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 behaviour. 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 $8,000–$9,000 USD.

Customer Support

To maintain customer trust, you need a support module. With it, you can show your support 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. 

This service will likely set you back a minimum of $25,000 USD.

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' implementation cost, it typically starts from $8,000 USD.

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.

Expect this feature to cost at least $5,000 USD.

The Result

So, how much does the completed custom CRM development cost? This can depend on many factors, but according to the information we've provided so far, it's possible to calculate an approximate cost. Here is the overview for every module:

• Sales: $51,000 USD
• Marketing: $26,000 USD
• Customer support: $38,000 USD

Therefore, the cost of your custom CRM will likely start at $115,000 USD. Keep in mind that 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.

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The Cost of Building vs. Buying a CRM System

The custom CRM development costs initially put off most businesses, especially startups and small companies.

On the other hand, building your own CRM entails utilizing a low-code development platform or online database software to create a customized solution in-house. This option provides flexibility and control over the development process, allowing you to adapt the CRM as your business evolves.