8 questions to ask when choosing a CRM: a checklist before the demo

When choosing a CRM, teams usually put the feature lists of two or three products side by side, watch the demos, and lean toward the one with the most impressive screens. Yet the questions that decide the outcome often occur to you only after the demo, once use has begun. That is why it helps to have a short list of questions in hand before you walk into a demo.

A CRM is customer relationship management software in which company and contact records, conversations, opportunities and quotes are kept in one place. You can use the eight questions below whichever CRM you evaluate; we give example answers from our own product, YazSis CRM AI.

Write down the need first

Before moving on to the question list, take a page of notes: What is the sales team losing today? Where are quotes getting stuck? Who follows up on collections? Are support tickets separate from sales? These notes give you a yardstick when weighing the vendor’s answers. A product that says “it does everything” is not the same as a product that solves your three real problems. Draw up your notes by talking to sales, support and accounting staff separately; the place where each team suffers losses is different, and the CRM will have to serve all three teams at once.

Eight questions

1. Does it cover what comes after the sale? Do the quote, collection, support and renewal sit on the same company card, or is each a separate module? In YazSis CRM AI, contacts, installations, conversations, opportunities, quotes, collections and e-mail history are gathered on a single card.
2. Who sees what? Is there role and permission separation? YazSis CRM AI has the Manager, Support, Sales and Accounting roles; the menu is filtered by permission.
3. Can actions be traced? Who changed a quote or a collection, and when? In YazSis CRM AI all write operations are recorded in an audit log with the person, the action and the IP address; password and key values are not written to the record.
4. Where will we find prospect companies? Is data entry left entirely to the team? In YazSis CRM AI the AI scanning agent extracts and scores prospect findings from industrial zone sites, chamber directories, web search and the official map API.
5. What does the AI do, and who has the final say? Does the AI create records on its own? With us the agent only writes findings; staff approve or reject a finding, and no company card is opened from an unapproved finding.
6. How do e-mail and consent management work? Is there a one-click unsubscribe link, a privacy notice text, import and export of consent records, and a test mode? In YazSis CRM AI an address that has unsubscribed is never sent to again, and İYS consent and refusal records can be transferred.
7. What does it offer for sales planning? Is there a territory and map view, a call list, an opportunity pipeline? These are the parts that make the daily work easier for teams working in the field and on the phone.
8. Is what works today separated from what is planned? Can the vendor separate in writing what is used live from what will be set up within the project scope? The scope of the relationship with existing systems should also be settled at this stage.

How do you evaluate the answers?

Write the answers to the eight questions in a table and mark each row “ready”, “within project scope” or “not available”. Those marked “ready” go straight into use. For those “within project scope”, the timing and scope must be in writing; a verbal promise looks nice in the demo and turns out expensive in use. Those marked “not available” are either accepted or change the choice, depending on how important they are to you. If you fill in the same table for every product you evaluate, the choice is made not on impressions but on answers that can be read side by side.

• Ask them to run the demo with an example that resembles your own data; try your process instead of a ready-made, flawless scenario.
• Ask whether the screens come from the live system or from prepared images.
• Have at least one salesperson and one accounting employee from your team attend the demo; the questions should come from the people who will use it, not from the boss.

Three checks before you decide

1. Try it with a small amount of real data. Enter a few companies, a few opportunities and a quote with your real information. If the screens describe your work, the choice is heading in the right direction.
2. Write down who steps in and when. If it stays unclear who will do the installation, the team training and the first data import, and what is expected of you at which stage, the project is left half-finished.
3. Find out the way out. Can you access your data when you need it, and can you export the consent records? The question you do not ask today may be the one that matters most later.

A common mistake in the choice is to pick the software that offers the most features. Every unused feature is an extra screen to learn. Letting the sales, support and accounting teams work on the same record is worth far more than the number of features, because the real job of a CRM is to take information out of individuals’ heads and put it in a shared place.

You can find the screen-by-screen introduction, the roles and the trust principles on the YazSis CRM AI page, and request a demo together with your own question list.