Don't implement a CRM system

I'm referring to a full-blown customer relationship management system (referred to by most as a CRM).
Although I am a great believer and user of CRMs, I feel that you need 12-months using a simpler system (see Setup a customers list) before you invest in one. CRMs usually cost anything from AU$250 up to tens of thousands. Long before a CRM will deliver value, a simple customers list and tracking system (see Track all contacts with customers and suppliers) will give you positive ROI almost immediately. You can always migrate your customer data to a CRM at a later date.
There is just too much functionality in a CRM which can be quite daunting for anyone; even a technology-savvy person can struggle - trust me I know! I liken it to your first carpentry project, a saw-horse perhaps, when you need to draw a quick plan... AutoCAD is definitely overkill here. Perhaps after a few projects, once you are familiar and comfortable with the tools and techniques of the trade, you could start with a simple drawing program to 'assist' you to develop a plan that gives you access to features that you'll actually use. Going from nothing to a complete CRM implementation is overkill for an SME. You just won't get immediate value, and it is likely to negatively impact your ability to add to, or access, your customer data.
I'm suggesting that you should steering clear of a formal CRM initially. Feel free to trial one of the basic systems once you have setup your customers list and it has started providing some value. There's no point making the commitment to a formal CRM unless you get the process-side sorted out first.

When I refer to the 'cost' of the CRM, I'm referring more specifically to the time cost to learn the product rather than the dollar-cost of the CRM itself. Some vendors are even offering their systems for free (see New Breed Of CRM Software Designed For SME’s). I've spent hundreds of hours adding custom fields, developing custom reports and browsing the data in our CRM system and haven't spent a cent.

So when should you make the leap over to a CRM? Once your Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and notebooks start becoming unwieldy and making it difficult to follow-up leads and conduct customer surveys, you know you're ready for a formal CRM. Although not an exact science, I'd suggest once you've got more than 50 customers and/or more than 200 leads, the time commitment of a CRM will be worth it. Personally I've got around 50 customers and have 400+ leads in our CRM. I can now run a search for all customers who've not made a purchase in the past six months and generate a spreadsheet with their contact details in less than 5 minutes. This would have taken me hours if we'd still been using a simple customers list. However, when we only had 10 customers and 50 leads (and used an Excel customers list), it was pretty easy to scan the list and generate a targetted marketing lists in less than hour.
There are hundreds of functions I still don't use in our CRM, but the few I do use are well worth the time investment to get the system started and keep the data maintained. We also keep invoices in our CRM, duplicating our accounting system data to some extent, but this means I can run reports based on sales revenue; very handy.