When thinking of your next sales CRM most people would immediately think of a CRM solution like Salesforce, the original CRM. But traditional CRM systems were specifically built to serve only B2B businesses—and you can tell.

B2B CRMs aim to help salespeople manage long, relatively complex sales cycles and one-to-one communications, and they often pair with marketing tools to nurture leads across the course of a lengthy sales funnel. Yet despite this, many B2C marketers still tried to force B2B CRMs to serve their very different business needs.
It is amazing how many primarily B2C brands are trying to implement a B2B CRM like Salesforce and finding it too expensive, too complex and too much for their needs so here are some simple points to help you decide to B2B or B2C with your sales CRM.

Number & Value of Leads
B2C businesses like banks, insurers and car dealers deal with much higher volumes of leads than B2B businesses like accountants or software providers. Many platforms costs a based on lead volumes so B2C providers can find platforms like Salesforce expensive.
B2C businesses not only deal with higher volumes of lead but also lower value of leads. B2B businesses leads can be worth tens of thousands or even millions of dollars. Typically B2C companies average sales value is less. Therefore, the cost of managing each lead is much more important and again a B2C CRM can offer significantly lower unit costs.

Costs
B2B CRMs tend to charge on a cost per agent basis. These fees can be US$50 to US$120 per month resulting in annual fees of US$30,000 to US$72,000 in licence fees per annum for 50 agents and managers assigned to the CRM. This might make sense for higher value sales, but for most B2C companies this is highly costly, without even mentioning large set-up, confirmation and management costs.
B2C CRMs for the same number of agents can range from US$12,000 to US$20,000 per annum and without huge set-up costs.

Functionality
All CRMs add huge value holding and organisation your sales lead data, enabling performance management, analytics and better decisioning. However, on top of this B2B CRMs offer ‘account management’ type functionality such as managing large accounts with multiple contacts, multiple proposals, lengthy sales cycles and more stages in the buyer cycle. These layers of functionality require more training, more configuration, more integrations and more cost. B2C CRMs are less complex, easier to train staff and more likely to be adopted and used internally with sales teams and management.

So, when deciding on a sales CRM, to B2B or B2C, that is the question and the answer should be clear, who is your primary customer, a business or a consumer?

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