Whether you’re buying your first CRM or evaluating whether your current system still fits, the process starts the same way:
Understanding what you actually need.
A proper CRM requirements assessment cuts through feature lists and vendor marketing to identify the capabilities that will genuinely support your business. Here’s how to approach the process (plus a checklist to keep you on track).
Start by identifying your CRM goals
Jumping straight into a detailed feature comparison is certainly tempting. A better approach, however, is to carefully examine your goals before spending any time on vendor evaluations.
After all, how can you know which CRM features are relevant without a proper understanding of your true needs?
Knowing your CRM software requirements, business processes and business requirements is an important first step to selecting the right CRM solution. Doing a requirements gathering exercise followed by creating a requirements document (system and functional requirements) is the formal way to start the process.
One of the best ways to to begin understanding your CRM needs is to set some basic goals:
Primary CRM goals
At the end of the day, why does your company need a CRM?
Achieving 100% user adoption is a necessary objective, but is it the main motivator for adopting a new CRM? Of course not. In the long run, you need a CRM that will help you increase revenue and grow business faster with effective use of data.
If you’re a service-based business, your primary CRM goal may be to elevate customer relationships and deliver projects on time and to specification. If you’re a manufacturer, you may be looking for a better way to organize a rapidly evolving web of production, supplies, distribution, customer, and order data.
Start by clearly defining and documenting your high-level “why,” and everything else will start to fall into place for your CRM assessment.
Secondary CRM goals
With your primary goals defined, it’s time to identify secondary goals. Secondary goals can come in a wide variety of forms. Some are easily tracked, while others require additional data and investigation.
Get some basic ideas down on paper (you can refine and improve them later). Here are a few examples:
- We want to select and implement a CRM that staff will actually use.
- Our new CRM will become our central source of truth for all business data.
- We need a CRM that will help with sales and marketing alignment.
- We need a CRM that scales and adapts to our rapidly changing business model.
- In the next 90 days, we want to migrate our legacy on-premise CRM to a cloud-based solution.
- Our goal is to achieve a 90% MQL-to-SQL ratio.
As you can see, defining your CRM goals has less to do with features and more to do with outcomes. Develop your primary and secondary CRM goals and use them as a guidepost for all future vendor and feature analysis for your CRM needs assessment. You will be amazed at how this simple, yet important act will foster greater alignment among stakeholders.
Three approaches for performing a CRM needs assessment
“Smart” goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. What additional information do you need to align your goals with this reality? What is the best way to convert your vision into an actionable CRM needs assessment?
Here are three possible approaches:
1. Top-down
Commonplace among smaller organizations, the top-down approach heavily relies on senior leadership’s past experiences and knowledge.
For example, let’s assume that your company recently hired a chief revenue officer who possesses decades of experience with CRM technology. This first-hand expertise is highly useful to your organization and you’d be wise to use it as a driving factor in the identification and sequencing of your needs.
Bottom-up
Some leaders take a “hands off” approach to CRM needs assessments, deferring instead to sales, IT, and/or administrative staff.
The logic is that frontline SDRs, account executives, customer success agents, and marketing staff, etc. will be the primary day-to-day users of the software, not the senior management.
In theory, the bottom-up approach sounds good, but in reality, collecting and considering input from every CRM user is rarely feasible—especially for midsize and enterprise organizations.
Hybrid
Combining the best aspects of top-down and bottom-up can be a viable solution for many companies.
Forming a cross-functional team that includes senior leaders along with mid-level and front-line users can streamline the collection and analysis of input without overwhelming the system. With the hybrid approach, you are considering all aspects—big picture and long-term goals as well as execution process, including daily user experience.
Core CRM capabilities to evaluate
With your goals defined, you need a framework for evaluating whether a CRM can actually deliver on them. Here are the core capability areas to assess.
Contact and pipeline management
Contact management is the foundation of any CRM—every system should centralize customer and prospect data in one place, with full interaction history attached to each record.
Pipeline management tracks deals through stages you define, giving visibility into what’s active, what’s stalled, and what’s likely to close. Look for customizable fields and stages that match your actual sales process rather than forcing you into a generic template.
Reporting and analytics
Your CRM should surface the metrics that matter—pipeline value, conversion rates, sales cycle length, rep activity—without requiring a data analyst to pull reports. Customizable dashboards help here, letting sales leaders, executives, and individual reps each see what’s relevant to their role without wading through data that isn’t.
Forecasting capabilities add another layer, helping you project revenue based on pipeline data. Just keep in mind that forecast accuracy depends heavily on consistent data entry habits across your team — garbage in, garbage out.
Integrations and workflow automation
A CRM that doesn’t connect to your existing tools creates more work, not less. Before you commit, check that it integrates with your email, calendar, ERP, and marketing systems—the apps your team already lives in.
Workflow automation handles the repetitive stuff like follow-up reminders, lead assignment, or small status updates. That frees your team to focus on selling rather than data entry. And if you can find no-code integration options, your ops team can build connections without waiting on IT or hiring consultants to do it for them.
Security, scalability, and support
Every CRM vendor will tell you their platform is secure. What you actually need to verify depends on your industry. Healthcare and financial services companies should confirm HIPAA or SOC 2 compliance. Everyone else should at least see role-based access controls and encryption as standard, plus GDPR or CCPA compliance if you’re dealing with consumer data.
Growth introduces its own questions. Will the system slow down when you triple your contact database? Will pricing jump dramatically when you add users? Get clear answers before you sign—not after you’ve migrated everything over.
Support is the other variable that’s easy to overlook. Some vendors offer dedicated account managers while others point you to a knowledge base and leave you to fend for yourself. Be honest about your team’s technical capabilities and choose accordingly.
CRM needs assessment checklist
Regardless of who will be performing your CRM needs assessment—whether a senior manager or a cross-functional committee—there are several key questions that must be answered before going any further.
What is the top reason for considering a new CRM vendor?
Think back to your primary and secondary goals. Avoid feature talk here. Rather, try to pinpoint how your current CRM may be slowing down growth, missing your business needs, or is misaligned with your business objectives.
Consider questions like:
- Is it about pricing, workflows, dashboards, or general compatibility with your business?
- Does it connect well with the apps you already use?
- Is there a way to integrate automation via an API to connect with your marketing platform and campaigns?
- What about social media apps?
Map the responses here to your CRM requirements.
What does your current CRM do well (if anything)?
Chances are, there’s something that your CRM does well to support your sales process. It’s OK to be specific and ask your sales team.
Maybe converting leads to opportunities is straightforward. Maybe you like how uploaded lists of contacts appear immediately in the system. Consider:
- Is sales forecasting easy?
- How’s the general sales management experience?
- Is the sales team content with support?
- Is there a quality knowledge base to use when they get stuck?
What does your current CRM do poorly?
Again, be specific. Make a list of all the ways that your CRM fails to meet your needs:
- Customer data handling?
- Email marketing?
- Lead management or contact management?
- Opportunity management?
- Team member permissions?
- On-prem vs. SaaS limitations?
Keep in mind that as your business grows and changes, your CRM needs will too. Would your current CRM scale easily? Do they have the customer support you need?
Do you have a diagram of your current CRM processes?
Yes or no.
If no, you should create one before proceeding to the next question. If you’re doing a formal RFP, vendors will request this as part of requirements gathering—so it’s best to get started on it now. It also provides internal clarity to those on the selection team with less in-depth knowledge of the current CRM process.
It’s also a great way for everyone to see the lifecycle of leads, understand the CRM project as a whole, and get better insight into your CRM software requirements.
Do you have a diagram of your ideal CRM processes?
If technological limitations did not exist, what would be the best CRM to support your ideal buyer journey? Ask the same question for your customer journey and other important processes like project delivery, order fulfillment, and CRM user onboarding.
Think through the details:
- Will there be webinars?
- Templates for the team to use?
- Different modules depending on role or team segmentation?
- What will be the messaging around the new CRM implementation internally?
- When issues can’t be solved internally, who will be in charge of case management?
What data silos do you need to banish?
Data silos and underperforming CRMs often go hand in hand. Carefully examine all of the places where data resides:
- Spreadsheets
- Email inboxes
- Third-party marketing systems
- Mobile apps
- Project management platforms
Is it possible to reduce or eliminate such silos with a better aligned CRM?
Do you have the in-house project management and IT capabilities?
Switching CRMs can be a complicated and time-consuming process. If you decided to switch CRMs today, what additional resources would your team need?
- New hires?
- Consultants?
- Support packages?
These are people who are keen on system requirements, operating system limitations, and the like. Are there templates for major switches like this that an IT project manager may have access to?
What is the opportunity cost of the status quo?
Yes, your current CRM may have a negative impact on revenue performance. But to what extent? How does this compare to the cost of switching CRMs, training users, and supporting an entirely new platform?
What’s the budget?
If you’re relying on a legacy on-premise system or database, you may not have a true CRM software budget—aside from the ongoing cost to support a non-cloud solution.
Even if you’re already using a cloud solution, the cost of switching may be more (or less) than your current subscription. Be sure to define a ballpark CRM budget now and refine it later so everyone is aware of the pricing constraints for your new CRM system.
Run your CRM assessment with the right goals in mind
Upgrading your CRM can make a decisive impact on your business operations and customer relationships. But that’s especially true when internal needs are carefully examined and understood before you start engaging vendors and comparing features.
If you’re looking for a CRM built for mid-market teams, Insightly is worth a look.
Insightly combines contact management, pipeline tracking, and project delivery in one platform—with no-code integrations that connect to the tools you’re already using.
Ready to see if it fits your requirements?
Start a free trial or request a personalized demo.
Want to dig deeper into the switching process first? Download Insightly’s free ebook on switching CRMs.
Commonly asked questions about CRM requirements and assessments
Still have questions about running a CRM needs assessment? Here are answers to the most common ones.
What is a CRM assessment?
A CRM assessment is a structured evaluation of your current system—or lack of one—against your actual business needs. The goal is to identify gaps, inefficiencies, and areas where a different solution might serve you better.
Most assessments examine data quality, user adoption rates, feature utilization, and alignment with business goals. If your team is working around the CRM instead of with it, an assessment will surface that.
What are the core requirements for CRM?
Core requirements typically include contact management, pipeline tracking, reporting, and integration with your existing tools.
But don’t stop at features. Consider implementation speed, customization flexibility, and whether your team can realistically adopt the system. A CRM with 100 features you don’t use isn’t meeting your requirements—it’s just expensive shelfware.
How do you gather CRM requirements from stakeholders?
Start by identifying who will use the CRM daily—sales reps, managers, marketing, customer success—and document their specific workflows and pain points.
Balance frontline input with leadership priorities. The hybrid approach we mentioned earlier, combining top-down goals with bottom-up user needs, typically produces the most realistic requirements list.
