How can pipedrive be a better investment also capable of avoiding the vendor’s Lock-In effect?
It can be odd, but some tools are developed better than others …some systems are just poor, aren’t they?
How to choose a CRM if you have no idea of what a Customer Relationship Management can/should do?
Learning the logic of Customer Relationship Management may be tedious, if you don’t do it for a living, why should someone spend time learning everything about a software to use it in support of the real job one does?
The good new is that we can discuss here some relevant features that may impact CRM choices avoiding falling trapped in badly designed tools
Let’s analyze a hidden feature that users will only discover too late: data export.
Data export is not a problem until you decide to migrate away, then it will be too late. When you need it you may discover that data export is really really poor and you can’t migrate all of the dataset but just part of them.
Why? Let’s imagine, for instance your old CRM is not producing an export of the table properly linked to other tables. That data will be totally useless when imported into another Customer Relationship Management, as there is no way to relate them to other data.

To make it clear: you have a task manager in the CRM, you fill many tasks ToDo then, once performed them you mark as Done. When you migrate to the new CRM you want to keep the whole history of your contacts: tasks done as well as future tasks.
But that table of tasks doesn’t provide the link to the person (the person ID). Importing that list of tasks will be completely useless as they are not related to a deal or a person or even a company to whom you were dealing with.
It is simple: your previous Customer Relationship Management has been developed to not export that link, even if it surely has it.