Michael Angstadt talks to us about choosing a CRM or ERP system, and what to look for depending on your company's needs. Be sure to let us know what you think and if you have any questions in the comments below. We live and breathe business applications, and we're always glad to discuss with our viewers. Video Transcript Hi, Mike Angstadt here from Clarity Ventures, and today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how to pick your next CRM or ERP system. Now this is a quick checklist I go through with our clients that come to me with the same question, and hopefully it will answer yours when it comes time to picking what solution is right for you. So first, do you like Microsoft outlook? This is really important when you're weighing your options between different enterprise CRM, ERP systems because Microsoft Dynamics directly integrates with Outlook. So, as opposed to some other third party systems, you can directly create new contacts, leads, prospects as well as take client messages and other information from your inbox, import it directly into your CRM. So you get that data in there to help you make the business intelligent decisions you need to downstream report etc., etc. So if you want to decrease the amount of tediousness that is required with some other systems, it's definitely something to think about. Two, do you have more than 20 people at your company? This isn't so much which enterprise level CRM, but if you need one to begin with. There's a lot more cost effective ways, such as Zoho CRM, to do some of these same activities if you have less than 20 people. But if you have more than 20 people and you're growing, you really need to pick something that's going to be able to scale with your company, support multiple users across multiple locations, and really think about it in more of an enterprise level scenario. So you're really looking at things like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, or Sage. Is your timeline two years or less? I always like to bring this up because timeline is not only the amount of time it's going to take you to actually take one of these out-of-the-box systems and customize it for your specific business, but it's also the lead time it's going to take to roll it out across your organization and train people how to use it. So something like a Microsoft Dynamics, which is very familiar when it comes to the people who know Windows, know Microsoft Office, is a lot more lower barrier to entry to bring people on board and have them get adoption internally, opposed to something that they might not be as comfortable with. This is a big piece right here that a lot of people aren't talking about yet. Office 365 is the next generation Microsoft Office, and they're really aiming to integrate it heavily into Microsoft Dynamics and move downstream a lot out of the report sharing, document sharing, business intelligent tools, things like that to the everyday employee, not just the executives in their towers. So when you think about what ERP system you're going to go to next, it might make a lot of sense, if you want to empower your employees to be able to make business decisions, to look at what 365 is going to offer and think about whether Microsoft Dynamics is the right choice for you.