CRM Trade Study

For Acquisition Entrepreneurs

Knowing I wanted to stay organized and have a method to easily track all the different contacts I am and will be making in this process led me to the conclusion that I needed a better way than a Rolodex. The good news is there are now a plethora of different options with some pretty amazing free or low cost capabilities. After reading through Searchfunder threads and finding this article by Joe Steigman from a Searchfunder poll, he created. I put together a list of possible candidates.

CRM’s for Acquisition Entrepreneurs

• Hubspot

• Zoho

• Pipedrive

• ESPOcrm

• LibreOffice Database

• Spreadsheet

Unwisely, I dove in and created an account with each of these, except ESPOcrm where I used the live demo to evaluate it. I had in my head that I wanted something simple and easy to use that didn’t break the bank. It was unwise because I had not defined some important questions, namely:

• What is the primary method of contact I am I going to be making with

  • Business owners

  • Business Brokers

  • Investors

• Do I need/want email integration?

• Do I require deal flow automation?

• Am I going to be working with a team where I require team management features?

Now, I might be a little naive, but my thesis is that founding owners of service businesses that are ready to retire are less likely to be internet savvy. Plus, how easy is it to ignore an email or classify it as spam, especially if it is an automated email from a CRM? The opposing view uncovered in all my research is that it is a numbers game and email is easy to get large numbers and cheaply. For business owners, I think phone or physical mail is going to be the most effective method of first contact.

For business brokers, first contact is going to be the phone. The same probably holds for investors. Both business brokers and investors, it might be a better strategy to use a video call.

No matter what, I think the goal of first contact is to establish a basic fit check and then try to get to an in person meeting as fast as possible. Maybe that doesn’t make sense if I need to drive 14 hours to meet them, but I believe in person meetings are the most effective.

Back to CRM’s, my thesis is that email integration is unnecessary, as I don’t believe it will be my primary method of outreach. Because email is secondary, and I am planning to work alone, I don’t think automation is going to be useful. Now I could be totally wrong and will readdress as I move along.

My initial review of the CRM’s is below. It is important to note that this came from evaluating each for at least 1 hour. Trying to add entries for contacts, categorize them, and generally play around with the features. Basically this is not an in depth review, probably not fair, and very specific to my use case. In other words, take everything here with a grain of salt, and in this case a huge grain.

Hubspot

Hubspot was fairly complex with tons of features, most of which are not available for free. Using it for the basics will require quite a bit of learning, but if the business I buy needs CRM this time could be helpful. The main problem I see with Hubspot is it seems to climb to be expensive relatively quick and skyrockets up to $1200/month for 10users if you want the automated marketing, etc.

Zoho

Zoho was easier to get started than Hubspot, and also comes with a ton of features. The free version doesn’t limit nearly as much, and it would appear that as a business searcher would have more than enough features for free. Again if the business I buy needs a CRM learning this system could be helpful in the long run. Zoho also doesn’t seem to ratchet up the price nearly as much with the top cost of $40/month/user.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive was easier to start than Hubspot, but slightly harder than Zoho. It has a bunch of features as well, and it’s pricing is near that of Zoho above base, which is $12.5/month. It does not seem to have much in the way of tutorials to guide you through using it, unlike Zoho.

ESPOcrm

ESPOcrm seems pretty easy to use, maybe it has fewer features or is less configurable as the others in this list. Its price is both great and not so great. First, it’s open source, so it’s free if you want to run your own server. This is great if you are a Linux guru already, but not so great if you are like me and still a Linux newbie even after using Linux for 18 years. To be fair, I did not try to install it myself, so it might be easier than I am guessing it will be. If you want to use the cloud version instead for a single user, it’s a minimum of $45/month, which includes up to 3 users.

LibreOffice Database

LibreOffice Database is built into the open source suite, and that makes it free. Now it is not going to be integrated or have fancy features, but I thought might be more robust than a spreadsheet. That said, I spent an hour trying to get it to work on my Mac without success. I installed Java, but LibreOffice would not recognize my Java installation. After some searching, it would appear it is not an uncommon problem.

Spreadsheet

There are plenty of available options to use a spreadsheet, such as, LibreOffice, Mac’s built-in Numbers, MS Excel which a free version online is available, Google Sheets, and probably 20 other options. This method is the least expensive in initial investment of time and money. Will it be the least expensive in time after 1,000 or 10,000 entries are made?

Conclusion

I don’t want to spend weeks of time learning a CRM with the cost and complexity it adds for what I currently perceive as minimal benefit, since most of my outreach will be in the form of phone and physical mail. This could change and if it does, I can easily import the spreadsheet I decided to use. I almost feel like I wasted over 2 days digging into CRM’s to come to the conclusion I don’t want to use one, just yet. If you think otherwise, please comment in the comment section or shoot me an email, jordan@sleepycreekcapital.com.