Choosing a CRM that survives contact with your sales team

Why CRM evaluations stall

Almost every stalled CRM project we are called into has the same shape. Four vendors send polished demos, each one looks convincing in isolation, and then the team discovers that the platform with the best forecast requires a nightly data load from a system nobody wants to touch. Two months later the evaluation is quietly cancelled.

The failure is not in the software. It is in the comparison: different demos, different scopes, different assumptions about what you already have. JIGSAW GLOBAL LTD removes that ambiguity before a single demo happens. We map your process, write the requirements in your team's language, and give every vendor the same brief with the same response format.

What we compare

Shortlists from JIGSAW GLOBAL LTD are scored on five dimensions, each weighted by your team rather than ours:

• Process fit — can the platform run your quoting, approval and handover rules as they are today, without custom code you will pay for twice?
• Adoption effort — how many clicks to log a visit, how many fields to fill, how often reps will work offline.
• Data and integration — open APIs, exportable data, and what it costs to connect your ERP and phone system.
• Three-year cost — licences, implementation, storage, admin hours and the cost of the platform you will migrate away from later.
• Exit options — what your data looks like on the day you leave, and whether you can take it with you.

How the engagement runs

The audit is free and yours to keep. From there JIGSAW GLOBAL LTD runs interviews with two or three of your people, delivers a written requirement brief within five working days, and presents the scored shortlist in a live walkthrough so your team can argue with the weights before a contract exists.

Fixed project fee from $4,800 for a standard three-to-five platform evaluation. Platform subscriptions and vendor implementation fees are quoted separately and shown in full — never folded into our number.

Here is the part vendors dislike: JIGSAW GLOBAL LTD records what each platform will not put in writing. Contract terms around data export, price increases after year one, and the cost of the extra seat you did not plan for. You get that list as a separate page, not as a footnote.

Questions worth asking any CRM

If you run your own evaluation, ask these. They are the same ones JIGSAW GLOBAL LTD asks, and they separate the serious platforms from the sales decks quickly.

• Can I export every record, including attachments and audit history, in an open format?
• What does the platform cost in year three if our user count grows by a third?
• How long does a full data migration take for a database the size of ours?
• What breaks if our phone system or accounting package changes?