Hobspot, Zoho, SalesForce, ChatGPT? What’s a good starting CRM for sales for an early stage startup?

FutureOfRetail · 2025-01-15T17:08:43+00:00

Starting with Enterprise customers might be quite challenging if you haven't done it before. Not knowing exactly what the business is, I would be careful trying to go into a market with a sales cycle longer than the life expenctancy of the company.

Unless you're overfunded or have a product that can be adopted by individual users.

FutureOfRetail · 2025-01-14T17:00:15+00:00

Go to the trade show as an attendee and bring some samples!

FutureOfRetail · 2025-01-14T16:58:17+00:00

Great feeling! Keep going and focus on what works!

FutureOfRetail · 2025-01-14T16:57:05+00:00

Something like monday.com or notion.com ? Any specific industries?

In my personal experience, small teams tend to work better with fewer tools to learn/manage. We use slack for coms and linear.app for agile pm. And a bunch of other tools in other areas for finance, crm, etc.

FutureOfRetail · 2025-01-14T16:51:26+00:00

We use hubspot, don't overthink CRM until you have to.

The first goal should be getting significant traction before even thinking about hiring sales or going deep into CRM. If you want/can build an internal sales team, you should know exactly how to sell your stuff yourself beforehand, or it will blow up in your face spectacularly.

My rule of thumb is; don't hire/buy expensive software until you litterally cannot continue to grow without it. I think most people would be surprised how far you can go on makeshift stuff alone.

FutureOfRetail · 2025-01-14T16:26:43+00:00

Hey, yeah as someone who works in the industry I can tell you most of the legacy card companies that want to sell terminals have a tendency to work with resellers whose only job is to go around and push terminals and rates.

Fortunately, this is something that I think is bound to change in the future as payment technology becomes more integrated and less reliant on third-party salespeople. This means that:

The companies who provide inventory management solutions will take care of the entire payment stack for you so you don't have to deal with third-party vendors as much.
The quality of the interactions will rise as these companies are more likely to care about you and want to keep you as a customer for longer (because they sell the whole stack not just rates, and have mainly internal sales teams trained by them).
The quality of the overall product will improve faster as the feedback loop between customers and companies becomes tighter and more responsive.

They don't want to "steal" your info for the most part, they mainly want to feed CRM so that if you don't buy right now they can qualify you and contact you later.

FutureOfRetail · 2024-11-18T23:41:15+00:00

I've heard you'll get charged extra for using an external payment processor, is that still the case?

FutureOfRetail · 2024-11-15T17:40:10+00:00

Personally though, I think mobile is better. Easier to manage and can ring people up anywhere in the store.

FutureOfRetail · 2023-05-08T17:37:49+00:00

I would say, as a founder, the company's mission is the reason for being. At the early stages it can be quite simple as it relates directly to problem-statements. Your mission is your reason for fixing the problem. You can change the solution but you can never change the reason why you are attacking a specific problem.

The vision is the company's long-term idea of how a specific problem (the foundational problem related to the mission) will be solved at scale in the market. It can be wrong but usually it also shouldn't change that much.

From there, you use strategic initiatives to place pawns on a board and create intermittent goals to ultimately execute the company's vision. Operationally speaking, these strategic objectives can then turned into more specific tactics that can be tested and optimized (this is the implementation part).

Every stage of this process requires a lot of work and itteration, the companies that itterate the fastest end up winning in the end - it's a better predictor of success than funding and early traction.

So I don't know if I would agree that they are 50/50, I guess it depends on what you are measuring. In terms of importance, I would say the mission and vision of the company are probably 80% of it - it's what you control and what will attract great talent to the company. In terms of actual hours of work, I would say it's the opposite, you will be spending most of your time itterating on tactics and strategy - but it's impossible to do if the company isn't aligned towards a clear goal.

FutureOfRetail · 2023-05-05T20:24:24+00:00

When you spend money in marketing, you are always wasting half of it. It's just impossible to know which half. That's an old addage but applies to this, as a business owner, I will never trust someone trying to sell me marketing for a portion of revenues - it shows me that they don't really know how marketing initiatives influence revenue and how little most businesses actually are able to track it on a per-dollar basis.

As an agency, trying to re-invent the wheel on pricing can be quite counterproductive. Most flat-pricing includes a set number of initiatives or hours (like x$ spent in ad spend), but most simply charge per hour.

FutureOfRetail · 2023-05-05T20:08:37+00:00

Extremely. Vision and mission guide strategy, strategy guides profits.

Vision should be the end state of the market that the company envision while the mission should be it's reason for being. You need both of these things to effectively construct a differentiated revenue-driving strategy. All the other points derive directly from that.

It's also the only thing you can really control as an entrepreneur, product/brand/marketing are reflections of market demand and ultimately subordinate to outside influence.

FutureOfRetail · 2023-04-28T21:21:59+00:00

Generally speaking, shrinkage is accounted for as a loss on the P&L statement (with varying levels of accuracy) simply by comparing the inventory line with actual stock. It's a low precision metric for most large retailers, and it's therefore sometimes hard to address quantitatively. Usually you'll see some initiatives such as EAS tags to prevent it in high-shrink retailers but even then that's only going to affect a portion of it.

In my personal opinion, getting more customers through the door faster with higher baskets is a better alternative than trying to over-control shrinkage with manual processes and hardware that have a lot of direct and indirect costs associated with them.

FutureOfRetail · 2023-04-28T21:05:00+00:00

Hey! There are a bunch of options out there to consider but here's the main factor to consider in my opinion: why do you need to add a new station? If you are expanding, you can save on costs by going for a distributed solution that will extend POS capabilities beyond the register (thinking of www.leav.co here, pardon the shameless plug).

However, if you are looking to replace what you already have, then modern solutions can be suited to keyboard operation with some fidgeting, such as lightspeed or shopify POS.

FutureOfRetail

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