Criteria for choosing a CRM platform: team scale, process complexity, budget and integration ecosystem. No marketing, just specifics.
Choosing a CRM platform is not a popularity contest. It is a decision about which tool will carry the weight of your company’s processes for the next five years. Below are the criteria we apply in practice.
Team and process scale
- Up to ~50 users and sales processes in a single division — Zoho covers the need out of the box. Configuration instead of programming, predictable licence cost.
- Multiple teams, multiple business lines, processes that require code — Salesforce. The developer platform underneath gives room Zoho does not have.
- The middle zone — a process audit decides, not vendor preference.
Integration complexity
Zoho talks well to its own ecosystem and popular SaaS tools. Salesforce has the edge where the CRM must connect to an ERP, a data warehouse and legacy systems — at the cost of a larger integration budget.
Process first, tool second. A platform matched to a process that doesn’t exist is the most expensive way to build a spreadsheet.
Total budget, not licence price
The licence is the start of the bill. The real cost: implementation, data migration, integrations, training, maintenance. On Salesforce the non-licence items can exceed the licences several times over; on Zoho the proportions are gentler, but not zero.
What follows from this
We don’t sell one platform to everyone. Enterprises with complex processes we point to Salesforce; SMBs that need a fast start — to Zoho. The choice is preceded by requirements analysis and a current-setup audit, because those point to the platform — not the other way round.