RFP Template: Choosing a CRM Platform for Your Business

Important Dates

CRM projects slip more often on dates than on features. A go-live that lands in the middle of your busiest quarter will fail even if you chose the right platform. As with any RFP, the easiest date to fix is the last one  – so start at go-live and work backwards.

• Implementation Date
  The date the CRM needs to be live and in use. Ask:
  • Is there an existing CRM contract expiring, and what notice period does it require?
  • Does your fiscal year, budget cycle, or reporting calendar constrain when you can switch?
  • Are you deliberately avoiding a period when the sales team cannot absorb a change, such as quarter-end or your peak season?
  • How much time do you need between contract signature and go-live for data migration, configuration and training? For most small teams this is weeks, not days.
• Decision Date
  The date you select a vendor and tell them they have won. To set it:
  • Ask how much lead time the vendor needs to assign implementation resources – CRM vendors schedule onboarding staff in advance, and a popular one may not be available immediately.
  • Allow room for contract and security review if your business requires one.
  • Then work back from the Implementation Date.
• Evaluation Date
  The date all submissions must be received, and when your review begins.
  • A CRM decision usually involves more stakeholders than a services RFP – sales, marketing, operations, finance and whoever will administer the system. Allow for their availability, not just yours.
  • Leave time for follow-up demos. Written responses rarely settle a CRM choice on their own.
  • Then work back from the Decision Date.
• Post Date
  The date you issue the RFP.
  • CRM vendors often involve a solutions engineer to answer technical questions on integrations and migration, so give a longer response window than you would for a services bid.
  • Set a clear cut-off for vendor questions, and a date by which you will circulate your answers to everyone bidding.
  • Then work back from the Evaluation Date.

Description

Vendors price and scope CRM implementations from what you tell them about your business. Vague inputs produce quotes you cannot compare. The more specific you are here, the closer the proposals will be to what you actually end up paying.

• What your business does, and who will use the system
  Describe your line of work and name the teams going into the CRM. A ten-person consultancy tracking a handful of long sales cycles needs something very different from a distributor processing hundreds of small orders a month.
• User counts by type
  Break out full users, occasional or read-only users, and administrators. CRM pricing is almost always per seat, so this single number drives most of your cost – and getting it wrong is the most common reason a quote balloons after signature.
• What you are moving from
  An existing CRM, a set of spreadsheets, an inbox, or nothing at all. Say roughly how many contacts, companies and open opportunities you hold, and how far back your history goes. Migration effort scales with this, and vendors will otherwise guess.
• The systems it has to work with
  List them explicitly: email and calendar, accounting, marketing or email automation, support desk, e-signature, telephony, website forms. Note which are non-negotiable.
• How you need to report
  Describe the handful of reports leadership actually looks at. Reporting is where CRM implementations most often disappoint, because it is discussed last and assumed to be easy.
• Where you expect to be in three years
  Headcount, new locations, new lines of business. This tells vendors whether to propose something you will outgrow.

Requirements & Questions

Ask every vendor the same questions, in the same order, and insist they answer in your format rather than sending a generic proposal. That is what makes the responses comparable.

Separate the hard requirements you cannot compromise on from the features that are merely desirable. Otherwise vendors will lead with strengths that do not matter to you.

• How will you migrate our existing data, and who does the work?
  Ask what is included, what costs extra, and what they expect your team to prepare. Data migration is the most commonly underestimated line in a CRM project. Ask specifically what happens to historical records and attachments.
• Which of our required integrations are native, and which need a third-party connector?
  A native integration is maintained by the vendor. Anything running through a middleware tool is another subscription, another failure point, and another thing to configure. Make them answer this per integration, not in general terms.
• What is the total first-year cost, itemised?
  Licences, implementation, migration, training, required add-ons, and any third-party tools needed to meet the requirements above. Then ask what year two looks like, and what governs renewal increases.
• What is included in onboarding and training, and what does it cost after that?
  Ask how many hours, delivered by whom, and whether training covers administrators as well as end users. A CRM nobody has been taught to use is the most expensive kind.
• Who administers the system after go-live?
  Establish whether routine changes – new fields, new pipeline stages, new reports – can be made by someone on your team, or whether every change is a support ticket or a billable request.
• What security certifications and compliance standards do you hold, and where is our data stored?
  Ask for current certifications by name, and where data physically resides. If you operate under specific data residency requirements, state them as a requirement rather than a question.
• What happens to our data if we leave?
  Ask what export formats are available, whether the export includes attachments and history, how long you retain access after cancellation, and whether they charge for it. Ask this now, while they are still selling to you.
• What ongoing support is included?
  Hours of coverage, response times, channels, and whether a named contact is included or costs extra.
• Please provide references from businesses of our size in our industry.
  Insist on comparable size. A reference from an enterprise implementation tells you very little about how the vendor treats a ten-seat account.

Files

Attaching the right documents cuts a round of questions out of the process and produces sharper proposals:

• A field and record inventory – what you currently store, and roughly how many records of each type. This is the single most useful attachment for getting migration pricing that holds.
• Your systems list – every tool the CRM must connect to, with versions or editions where relevant.
• Your current process, briefly – sales stages, hand-off points, approvals. A simple list is enough.
• Sample reports – the reports leadership relies on today, or a sketch of the ones you need.
• Your existing contract – if you are switching, so vendors understand the timing constraint.

Scorecard

Set your weighting before you read a single proposal. Deciding what matters after you have seen the responses is how a decision gets made on presentation quality rather than fit.

A workable priority order for most small businesses:

1. Requirements fit
   Does it do what you listed as must-have, without customisation? Configuration you can do yourself is fine. Custom development to meet a core requirement is a warning sign – it costs more, and it tends to break when the vendor updates the platform.
2. Integrations
   Weighted this high because a CRM that does not talk to your other systems creates the duplicate data entry you bought it to eliminate. Judge native integrations far more favourably than connector workarounds.
3. Total cost of ownership
   Not the licence price. First-year all-in, plus year two, plus what happens at renewal. The cheapest headline number frequently is not the cheapest platform.
4. Security and compliance
   Move this up the list if you handle regulated data or your customers audit their suppliers. For some businesses this is a pass-or-fail gate rather than a scored line.
5. Implementation and support
   How you will be treated after the contract is signed. Reference calls tell you more here than any proposal will.

Score each vendor against every category, weight the categories, and record why you scored as you did. When someone asks in eighteen months why you chose this platform, that record is the answer.

Next Steps

Build this out as a project in PowerRFP and every vendor answers the same structured questions in one place, with a scorecard ready to compare them side by side. Create a free account and run your first CRM RFP.

Looking for a different category? See our templates for cleaning services, security services, waste programs and construction equipment rentals.-