Before you write requirements
First confirm that custom is the right route. Packaged CRM products are mature, and for a standard sales process they are quicker and cheaper. A custom CRM earns its cost when your process does not fit their model: unusual records, complex pricing or approvals, deep ties to operational systems, or users for whom per-seat pricing makes little sense. Our comparison of a custom CRM and HubSpot configuration works through that decision.
If custom is right, the requirements have one job: to let a designer and a developer understand your business well enough to build the smallest system that supports it. The sections below follow the order in which the questions are best answered.
Users and what each of them needs
| Role | Typical needs | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Sales representative | Fast entry on a phone, today's tasks, a customer's full history | Too many required fields, so nothing is entered |
| Sales manager | Pipeline by stage and person, forecasts, stalled deals | Reports that depend on data nobody enters |
| Account or service manager | Renewals, open issues, contacts at each customer | Service kept in a separate tool with no shared view |
| Marketing | Sources of enquiries, segments, consent records | Lists exported and edited outside the system |
| Finance and operations | Quotes, orders, credit status, handover to delivery | The same data retyped into another system |
| Administrator | Users, fields, stages and permissions | Every change needing a developer |
Interview at least one person in each role, and watch a salesperson work for an hour. What they keep in notebooks, spreadsheets and their own heads is your real requirements list.
The records you keep and how they relate
Every CRM is built on a few kinds of record. Decide what yours are called, what fields each needs and how they connect. This is the part where custom systems differ most from packaged ones.
- Companies and people. Can a person belong to several companies? Do companies have branches, parents or groups? Which fields are required to create one?
- Opportunities or deals. What is being sold, its value, its stage, its expected date, who is working on it and who at the customer is involved.
- Activities. Calls, meetings, emails, visits and tasks, each linked to a person, a company and a deal.
- Records particular to your business. Sites, vehicles, policies, projects, installed equipment, contracts. These are often the reason for building custom.
- Products and prices. Whether quotes are built in the CRM, and where product and price data comes from.
Keep required fields to the minimum that makes a record useful. Each extra field you insist on reduces how much your team will enter, and an empty CRM is worth less than a simple one.
Your pipeline and the rules around it
- 01
What are the stages, and what moves a deal forward?
Why it mattersDefine each stage by something the customer did, such as agreeing to a site visit, not by how the salesperson feels.
- 02
Is there more than one pipeline?
Why it mattersNew business, renewals and partner sales often follow different steps and need separate views.
- 03
What must be true before a stage change?
Why it mattersA quote attached, a credit check passed, a manager's approval above a certain discount.
- 04
How are leads assigned?
Why it mattersBy territory, product, size or turn. Unclear ownership is the most common cause of unanswered enquiries.
- 05
What happens when a deal is won or lost?
Why it mattersHandover to delivery, creation of an order, a reason recorded for the loss.
Communication capture and automation
A CRM is trusted when it holds the conversation history without extra work. Decide which channels should be recorded automatically: email, calendar, phone calls, website forms and messaging such as WhatsApp. For each, note whether your current provider offers an interface for it, and what consent or notice your customers and staff require.
Then list what should happen without anyone remembering. Useful automation is modest: a task created when an enquiry arrives, a reminder when a deal has been untouched for too long, an alert before a contract ends, a notification to delivery when a deal is won. Write each one as a sentence of the form when this happens, do that. Leave elaborate sequences for a later phase, once people are using the basics.
A worked example
Requirements for an equipment rental company
This example is invented to show how specific good requirements are. A company rents construction equipment and has outgrown a packaged CRM that cannot model its contracts.
- RolesTwelve sales representatives who work from vans, two managers, a rental desk of four and a credit controller.
- RecordsCompanies, contacts, construction sites as their own record, rental contracts linked to sites, and equipment on hire pulled from the fleet system.
- ProcessEnquiry, site assessed, quote sent, contract signed, equipment delivered. A quote above a set discount needs a manager's approval. A new customer cannot reach contract signed before a credit check.
- AutomationWhen equipment is due off hire within a week, the representative receives a task to call about extension. When a site record shows a new project phase, an opportunity is created.
- ReportsUtilization by equipment class against open quotes, so that sales effort follows what is sitting in the yard.
Sites as a record, and the link to the fleet system, are the two requirements a packaged product could not meet. Everything else in the document is deliberately standard, which keeps the custom build small.
Reports, integrations, permissions and existing data
- 01
Start reports from decisions
For each report, name the decision it supports and who makes it. Five reports that are read each week beat fifty that are not.
- 02
List integrations with their direction
Accounting, ERP, email, telephony, website forms, marketing tools. For each, say what flows which way and which system is right when they disagree.
- 03
Define who sees what
Whether representatives see each other's accounts, who can export, who can delete, and what is logged. Include how personal data requests will be handled.
- 04
Plan the data you will bring
Which sources, how far back, how duplicates will be merged and who signs off the result. Old CRM data is rarely as clean as people believe.
If an existing system such as an ERP is involved, our integration discovery questionnaire collects what a developer will ask about it.
The requirements checklist
Custom CRM requirements checklist
0 of 11 checkedWhat to do next
Draft the process section with your sales manager and two representatives in one sitting, then fill in the rest around it. Our custom software requirements builder gives the draft a structure and produces a document you can send to any company.
Our custom CRM development page describes how we turn requirements like these into a working system. Send us your draft and we will tell you which parts look standard and which are truly custom.
Common questions
When is a custom CRM better than a packaged one?
When your records or process do not fit the standard model of companies, contacts and deals, when the CRM must be closely tied to operational systems, or when licence costs scale badly with your number of users. If a packaged product meets most needs with configuration, it is usually the better choice, and a good adviser will say so.
How detailed should CRM requirements be?
Detailed enough that someone outside your company could explain your sales process back to you, and no more. Describe roles, records, stages, rules and reports in plain language with real examples. Leave screen layouts to the design stage. Over-specified screens remove the chance for a designer to find a simpler arrangement.
How do we get the sales team to use a new CRM?
Involve them in the requirements, remove every field they do not need, make entry fast on a phone and capture communication automatically. Then have managers run their meetings from the CRM, so that what is not recorded is not discussed. Adoption is designed into the system and reinforced by habit, and it cannot be ordered.
Should a custom CRM include marketing automation?
Usually not at first. Email campaigns and marketing sequences are well served by specialist tools that can be connected to the CRM. Building them again is rarely a good use of budget. Record the source of each enquiry and the consent given, and pass segments to the marketing tool through an integration.
What should happen to the data in our old CRM?
Decide what is worth bringing: active customers, open deals and recent history are obvious, while old leads and duplicates often are not. Clean the data before it moves, merge duplicates under agreed rules and keep a read-only copy of the old system for reference. Someone in the business must sign off the migrated data.