How to build a CRM like Hubspot

Build your own CRM

The market knows an abundance of CRM tools you can choose from, with HubSpot being one of the most popular. However, despite the many options, you might find yourself unable to find the perfect solution for your specific business needs.

This is why the best CRM software is a custom one, tailored to your specific business.

Drawing insights from our past partnership with Tecán Tequila, for whom we built a custom CRM, let’s look at what is needed to create your own CRM.

Understanding the core features of a CRM

Before diving into the development process, it’s crucial to understand the key features that make a CRM effective and the ones your specific business might need. The core features of a CRM usually include:

• Contact management, allowing you to store and manage customer information.
• Marketing automation to easily manage marketing campaigns and track their effectiveness. This can include email marketing tools.
• Lead scoring and routing to identify and distribute hot and cold leads among your sales team.
• Sales automation to streamline sales processes, monitor sales performance and track the stages of a deal as it progresses in the purchasing process (deal pipeline).
• Customer support tools for customer service management.
• Analytics and reporting so you gain insights through data analytics and reporting tools.

Plan and design

Before you can build your own CRM system, you must first define your objectives. Ask yourself: “What problems am I trying to solve” and “What features are most important to my users?”. By identifying the primary goals of your CRM, you will be able to choose the features it needs.

To do that, you can also look at other existing CRM tools and their strengths and weaknesses to later incorporate the best features into your CRM. In addition to the ones mentioned above, great functionalities can include real-time sales activity tracking, a meeting scheduler, live chat software, email templates and an AI-powered email writing assistant.

When it comes to design, aim for an intuitive and user-friendly interface. Use tools like Sketch or Figma to create wireframes and prototypes to ensure you offer your users the best experience possible. You can develop customizable views for contacts, deals and tasks, implement drag-and-drop functionality for ease of use, and last but not least, design responsive layouts for mobile access.

Development process

Once the planning part is done, choose the right tech stack and start the development process!

First, set up your development environment with the chosen technologies and ensure your team is familiar with the tools and frameworks.

You can then start building the core features:

• Contact management: Develop a module to store and manage customer data. Implement features like search, filter and tagging.

• Marketing automation: Build features to create and track marketing campaigns, segment customers and analyze campaign performance.

• Sales automation: Create tools to track leads, manage pipelines and automate sales workflows.

• Customer support: Integrate a ticketing system, live chat and a knowledge base.

• Analytics and reporting: Develop dashboards and reports to provide insights into sales, marketing and customer service performance. Try to make them as customizable as possible.

Ensure data security and compliance

Given that your CRM will be managing a lot of sensitive data, safeguarding user and client information is critical. To keep everything under wraps, make sure to utilize encryption techniques, develop user roles and permissions, and ensure that you’re following data protection regulations like GDPR.

Prepare for the future and plan for scalability

When thinking about scalability, it's crucial to create an architecture that can manage significant amounts of data without breaking a sweat. This means laying a solid foundation that can grow as your needs expand, ensuring that the system remains robust even under heavy loads.

Efficient data storage and retrieval are key components of this plan. You want to make sure that the methods you use for storing and accessing data are not only effective but also quick, so users don’t experience any lag. This will help keep everything running smoothly, no matter how much data you’re dealing with.

Lastly, it’s important to keep an eye on the future. Planning for new features and potential integrations from the get-go will save you a lot of headaches down the line. By anticipating what you might need later, you can build a Minimum Scalable Product, a system that’s flexible and ready to adapt as your project evolves.

Test thoroughly

As always when developing custom software, you have to test, test and test again. Run comprehensive tests on your CRM to confirm that it’s free of bugs and operates smoothly in different scenarios. It’s essential to cover all bases to ensure everything runs as it should.

There are several testing methods you can use, such as unit testing, which focuses on individual components, and integration testing, which checks how those components work together. System testing looks at the entire system as a whole, while user acceptance testing (UAT) involves real users to see if the CRM meets their needs.

By implementing these various testing strategies, you can catch any issues early on and enhance the overall performance of your CRM. This way, you’ll be better prepared for any challenges that might come up once it’s in use.

Once your custom CRM passes all tests, deploy it to a production environment. Remember to have a maintenance plan in place to handle updates, bug fixes and new feature implementations.

Building a custom CRM for Tecán Tequila

At Miyagami, we successfully developed a CRM for Tecán Tequila, a young brand set to revolutionize the tequila scene in The Netherlands.

We decided to go for a well-rounded strategy to create a complete system that brings together all aspects of Tecán's operations. Our tailored solution covers everything from customer relationship management to keeping tabs on inventory and tracking goals.

Our strategy revolved around the seamless integration of B2C and marketing activities, which we continuously evaluated alongside the B2B elements. This setup provided Tecán with real-time and detailed oversight of their business operations.

With this system, Tecán can effectively evaluate the influence of their marketing strategies on the B2C front and compare that with the sales they’re achieving in the B2B arena. It allows them to keep an eye on the complete customer funnels, using digital insights to guide their business growth.

Let’s build your own CRM system

If, like Tecán, you’re looking for a partner to help build a CRM that is perfectly tailored to your needs, Miyagami has the expertise and experience to deliver exceptional results. Contact us today to learn more.