For any company, selecting a CRM solution for a company is a major undertaking. Gartner has just provided an in-depth guide for doing so entitled “Select the Best-Suited CRM Solution with Gartner’s Evaluation Model”.

Gartner’s guide is meant as a highly technical guide for an analyst, and we’ll be using it as a reference for this ebook. But a point I made recently is that many times the wrong people—often a combination of executive and IT personnel—make decisions for which CRM system a company should adopt. This decision leaves out the people who will actually use it: salespeople. Using another field as an example, an architect would never be allowed to choose the tools that the builders are going to use to construct a house—that decision would be strictly up to the builders themselves. Similarly, I think salespeople should at least be included in the CRM selection process.

Hence, this ebook is meant for the potential userUser User means a person who uses or consumes a product or a service, usually a digital device or an online service. and is a more down-to-earth guide for selecting a CRM solution. That means that anyone could select a CRM solution, not just a high-end technical analyst.