Northwood Health stack-tested 14 CRMs in 30 days

Northwood Health is a 35-person digital health company building patient engagement software for primary care clinics. The sales and customer success teams had outgrown the entry-level CRM the company had used since founding. The selection process needed to be defensible to both the CFO and the board, neither of whom had agreed on a successor system after six months of informal evaluation.

The Head of Revenue Operations proposed a structured 30-day evaluation sprint. The premise: rather than long sales-led demos with three vendors and an executive decision in week six, the company would build a documented evaluation rubric, score every credible CRM in the market against it, and let data drive the shortlist before any executive time was spent.

The team built a 22-criterion rubric covering five categories: core CRM functionality (8 criteria), healthcare-specific compliance and integrations (4 criteria), reporting and analytics (4 criteria), pricing and contract terms (3 criteria), and migration effort from the incumbent (3 criteria). Each criterion scored 0-5. The maximum possible score: 110.

The list of 14 CRMs to evaluate was assembled from three sources: peer recommendations from other digital health companies (6), G2 category leaders for "CRM for healthcare" (5), and three wildcards (a workflow tool, a customer-data platform, and an open-source option) added to test whether the standard category was even the right answer.

The evaluation sprint ran across four weeks.

• Week 1: information gathering. Each vendor's public documentation, pricing page, and security disclosures were reviewed and scored on the criteria that did not require hands-on testing. Six vendors fell out of contention at this stage on either pricing or compliance grounds.
• Week 2: free-trial spinups. The eight remaining vendors were stood up in trial accounts. The team imported a representative slice of real data (anonymised) into each and ran a standardised set of seven workflows: lead create, opportunity progression, account merge, custom report, API integration to one downstream tool, mobile app interaction, and bulk export.
• Week 3: vendor calls. The four highest-scoring trials got 60-minute structured calls with the vendor's solutions engineer. Calls followed a fixed agenda focused on the four lowest-scoring rubric items per vendor — a pattern designed to expose weaknesses rather than confirm strengths.
• Week 4: final scoring, reference checks, and recommendation memo. Three vendors went into the final memo with full scores; one was clearly the leader.

The recommendation memo was 11 pages and read more like an investment memo than a software RFP. The CFO and board chair both signed off in the meeting it was presented in.

The chosen vendor was implemented over the following six weeks. The full evaluation-to-go-live cycle ran 76 days from kickoff. Compared to the prior six months of informal evaluation that had produced no decision, the structured 30-day evaluation sprint produced a defensible recommendation in roughly one-fifth of the time.

The migration itself stayed close to the projected effort estimate from the rubric (4 weeks of part-time engineering plus 2 weeks of admin reconfiguration). Nine months post-go-live, the new CRM has displaced two adjacent tools the company had been using to compensate for the prior CRM's shortcomings — a dedicated customer-success platform and a separate sales-enablement tool — for additional savings of $2,400/month.

The evaluation rubric itself has become a reusable artefact. The Head of Revenue Operations has since used the same 22-criterion structure (with categories adapted) to evaluate two other categories: marketing automation and customer feedback. Both evaluations completed in under 30 days each.

The methodology has been published internally as a "30-day evaluation playbook" and is now referenced by the engineering team for adjacent tooling decisions. The cultural shift mattered as much as the CRM decision: vendor selection at Northwood is now a documented, time-boxed process rather than a six-month executive distraction.