Buying a CRM is easy. Buying the right CRM — one your sales team actually uses and your support team can live in — is where most companies stumble. The market is split between heavyweight suites that take months to configure and lightweight tools that fall apart the moment a customer emails support. This guide gives you a concrete evaluation framework: the capabilities that matter, the questions that expose weak products early, and a checklist you can take into your next demo.
CRM and Ticketing: One System or Two?
The first decision is architectural. A standalone CRM knows your contacts and deals; a standalone helpdesk knows your tickets. When they are separate products, every support conversation happens blind — the agent cannot see that the person on ticket #4821 is a €40k renewal due next month, and the account manager cannot see the customer has three open incidents.
A unified platform puts contacts, companies, deals, activities, and tickets on the same data model. That single record is worth more than most feature checklists: support sees commercial context, sales sees support health, and reporting spans the whole relationship. Only split them if you have a genuinely specialized requirement — a call-center telephony stack, field-service dispatch — that a general platform cannot cover.
The Must-Have Capability Set
Strip away vendor marketing and a competent CRM + ticketing platform needs six things:
- Contact and company management — deduplicated records, custom fields, tags, and a real company hierarchy (contacts belong to accounts, not just lists).
- Pipeline tracking — leads and opportunities with stages, so deals move visibly from first touch to close.
- Activity timeline — calls, emails, meetings, and notes logged against the contact, so the next person who picks up the account has the full story.
- Ticketing with ownership — every ticket has a status, a priority, an assignee, and a comment thread. If tickets can sit unowned, your queue will rot.
- Automation — assignment rules, status transitions, and follow-up reminders. Manual triage does not scale past a handful of daily tickets.
- Reporting — pipeline value, ticket volume, response and resolution times. If you cannot measure it in the product, you will not manage it.
Migration: The Feature Everyone Checks Last
Your existing data is the real switching cost. Ask every vendor: how do I get my contacts in, and how do I get them back out? A serious answer is a self-serve CSV import that lets you map columns, validates emails, flags duplicates, and reports row-level errors — plus a full export so you are never locked in. "Our team can do that for you for a fee" is a red flag, not a service.
Prepare your file before you migrate: deduplicate by email, normalize statuses, and split multi-value tags consistently. Our free CSV Deduplicator removes duplicate rows in the browser, and the Email List Validator catches malformed addresses before they pollute the new system.
GDPR and Data Residency
A CRM holds your customers' personal data, which makes vendor due diligence a legal exercise, not just a technical one. Check where data is stored and processed, whether the vendor signs a Data Processing Agreement, how sub-processors are disclosed, and what happens to your data when you leave. For EU companies, an EU-headquartered vendor simplifies the Schrems II analysis considerably — though "EU company" alone is not proof; still verify the hosting chain.
Pricing Models: Read the Fine Print
Per-seat pricing looks cheap at three users and punishing at thirty. Before comparing sticker prices, model your 24-month cost at realistic headcount — including the contacts and ticket volume you will have then, not today. Watch for contact-count caps, per-ticket charges, features gated to higher tiers (especially API access and automation), and mandatory onboarding fees. A free tier that is genuinely usable — not a 14-day timer — lets a small team validate the workflow before money changes hands.
The Buyer's Checklist
Score every candidate against these ten questions:
- Can a support agent see the customer's deals and history without switching tools?
- Does every ticket carry status, priority, and a named owner?
- Can I import contacts via CSV with column mapping and row-level error reporting — myself, today?
- Can I export everything, in a standard format, without contacting support?
- Are contacts deduplicated on import (e.g., by email)?
- Does it sign a DPA and document where data is hosted?
- Is there a real free tier or trial I can test with real data?
- Which features are gated to higher tiers — and do I need any of them now?
- What does it cost at double my current headcount?
- Can I be productive in it within one afternoon, without training?
Red Flags
- CSV export behind a paywall or a support ticket.
- "Unlimited" plans with quiet caps on contacts, storage, or API calls.
- A demo that shows dashboards but not the daily workflow of adding a contact or closing a ticket.
- No public pricing — legitimate for enterprise contracts, suspicious for SMB products.
- Ticket and contact data living in separate modules that do not share a customer record.
Where OG CRM Fits
Full disclosure: we built OG CRM & Ticketing to this checklist — contacts, companies, leads, opportunities, and activities on one record, a ticketing helpdesk with priorities and threaded comments, a CSV importer with column mapping and duplicate detection, and a pricing page with a real free tier (Pro at €8/month, 14-day trial). It will not fit every organization — if you need call-center telephony or field-service dispatch, you need a specialist tool — but for teams that want sales and support in one place, you can create an account and be importing contacts within minutes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I buy CRM and helpdesk as one product or two?
One product for most small and mid-sized teams: a shared customer record beats the integrations you would otherwise have to build and maintain. Split only when a specialized requirement (telephony, dispatch, ITSM change management) justifies it.
What should a CRM CSV import include?
At minimum: name and email. Ideally also phone, company, job title, tags, and status (customer/lead/prospect). Deduplicate by email before importing — our CSV Deduplicator does this in the browser without uploading your data.
How long does CRM migration take?
For clean contact data under ~10k records, an afternoon: export, dedupe, map columns, import, spot-check. The slow part is never the import — it is deciding which stale records and dead custom fields to leave behind.
Is per-seat or flat pricing better?
Per-seat is fine at small headcount if the per-seat price is honest (e.g., €8/month) and features are not gated aggressively. Flat pricing wins as teams grow. Model the 24-month cost at your projected size before deciding — the model matters less than the trajectory.
