A mid-sized Indian business choosing its first proper CRM or ERP is making a decision it will live with for five to ten years, usually on the basis of three demonstrations that all looked good. Demonstrations are designed to look good. What separates a system that gets adopted from one that gets abandoned alongside the old spreadsheets is a smaller set of questions, most of which are specific to operating here.
Tax handling is the first and it is not negotiable. GST is not a percentage field — it is place-of-supply logic, HSN and SAC classification, the CGST-SGST-IGST split, e-invoicing with IRN generation for anyone above the turnover threshold, e-way bills for goods movement, and reconciliation against what suppliers filed. A global product with an Indian tax module bolted on will handle the common case and fail on yours. Ask for a demonstration using your own invoice types, including the awkward ones.
The second is whether the system can express how you actually price and sell. Indian mid-market businesses commonly have customer-specific rates, seasonal schemes, credit terms that vary by relationship, partial payments, and a distributor structure with its own margins. A CRM that assumes a published price list and a straightforward order will force the business to work around it, and workarounds are where adoption dies — the moment a salesperson has to record something falsely to make the system accept it, the data is worthless.
Third is what happens on a phone with a poor connection. Field sales, service engineers and delivery staff are the people whose data quality determines whether the system is useful, and they are working in conditions the software was probably not tested in. If entering a visit takes eleven taps and fails without a signal, it will be done from memory at the end of the week, badly, or not at all.
Integration is where the real cost hides. The system will need to exchange data with your accounting software, your bank, your e-commerce channel, your logistics partners and probably a legacy application nobody wants to replace. Ask specifically what integrations exist as products rather than as possibilities, and what an implementation partner would charge to build the rest. That number is frequently larger than the licence.
Finally, weigh the implementation partner as heavily as the software. In this market the same product produces excellent and disastrous outcomes depending entirely on who configured it and whether they understood the business. Ask to speak to two of their clients in your industry, ask what the project cost against its original estimate, and ask who specifically will do the configuration — the answer to that last question predicts the outcome better than any feature comparison.
