Things to Know Before Buying CRM Software: A Quick & Dirty Guide for Retail Brands
If you're evaluating CRM software for your retail brand, you’re not just choosing a platform — you’re choosing a growth partner. Whether you're overseeing 50 stores in the US or expanding your footprint across the globe, the right CRM can transform how your teams sell, serve, and scale.
1. Make Sure It’s Built for Brick-and-Mortar Retailers
This might feel obvious, but it's in the top spot for a reason. Most CRM platforms are built for SaaS or ecommerce companies, meant to be used by B2B sales people with long deal pipelines. But your store associates, stylists, or in-person sales teams need a different set of features. Growing omnichannel brands need a CRM that connects the dots between physical stores and digital behavior.
Things to look for:
- In-store sales tracking, not just online conversions.
- Customer profiles that include shopping history, purchases, preferences, and customer service notes left by other team members.
- Pre-built integrations with your point-of-sale systems like Shopify, NewStore, or Lightspeed
📌 Pro Tip: Ask any potential vendors how their CRM handles in-store vs. online customers. If the answer is “we treat them the same,” keep looking.
2. Your Store Teams Should Actually Want to Use It
If your retail team doesn’t use the CRM, it won’t matter how many features it has or how “powerful” it is.
Choose a CRM with a clean, easy-to-use interface and mobile access, especially for associates on the floor or store managers on the move. The best platforms empower your store teams to build relationships instead of wasting time on admin work.
Be sure to look out for:
- A mobile app for iOS and Android, or a mobile-optimized interface
- Pre-built templates for campaign messages and follow-ups
- Quick ways to take notes, tag customers, and see sales performance
📌 Pro Tip: Ask any potential vendors if they’ll do live training with your retail teams, not just send over a link to their help center.
3. Check That It Captures Actionable Customer Data
Retailers need more than just a customers' first name, email, and birthday to make a customer feel like the interaction is actually personalized. Customers are moving through handfuls of touch-points with your brands across many different channels, and the right CRM should help your team understand who your customers are, what they love, and when to reach out.
Things to consider:
- Support for clienteling workflows, like being able to filter by VIP tags, style preferences, or custom notes
- Centralized profiles combining online and offline behavior
- Real-time segmentation and filtering by spend, activity, or engagement
📌 Pro Tip: For any CRMs you're considering, be sure to ask how it helps your team take action on data — not just store it.
4. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Integrations
A CRM that doesn’t integrate with your tech stack isn’t a CRM — it’s a silo. The right retail CRM will connect effortlessly with your existing tools to create a unified tech stack across stores, ecommerce, and marketing. Whether you're syncing with your point-of-sale system, pulling product data, or automating personalized messaging, CRM integrations are what turn customer insights into sales-driving actions. Without them, your team is stuck juggling disconnected systems, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
Be sure to look for platforms that connect seamlessly to your:
- Point-of-sale (POS) system for both in-store and online
- Email and SMS platforms
- Loyalty apps
- Customer support software
📌 Pro Tip: Ask any vendors for their list of native integrations to make sure yours are on the list. Be sure to also ask what support they offer during setup.
5. Make Sure You Can Measure What Matters
At the end of the day, your CRM should do more than store customer data — it should help you drive revenue. For omnichannel brands, tracking performance by store, associate, or campaign is essential. So look for CRM platforms with built-in reporting that attributes sales, measures outreach effectiveness, and highlights key metrics like AOV and retention. Without clear insights, it’s impossible to prove ROI or optimize your strategy.
Things to look for:
- Revenue attribution for in-store and online sales
- Reporting by store, associate, or region
- KPIs like average order value (AOV), retention, and engagement
📌 Pro Tip: Ask to see example dashboards during the sales demo of any vendor you're considering. If the metrics don’t speak to your business goals, run!
Don’t Buy a CRM — Buy a Retail Growth Engine
Your CRM shouldn’t feel like another system to manage. It should feel like an extension of your brand — something your store teams, HQ, and customers actually benefit from.
At Endear, we built ours specifically for omnichannel retailers with physical locations. With seamless POS integrations, sales attribution, clienteling tools, and messaging built-in, we help growing retail brands turn customer data into sales — in every market, and in every store.