Create a CRM Strategy in 8 Steps or Less

Think of it like this: if your CRM is your vehicle, then your CRM strategy is your roadmap.

At its core, a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy is about understanding your customers on a deeper level — no matter what size business you are — to provide them with personalized experiences that solve their problems. By implementing a personalized CRM strategy, you can build stronger relationships with your customers, optimize your growth efforts, and get ahead in your industry.

This strategy includes all aspects of business, including marketing, sales, customer service, and analytics. It also serves as the trusted foundation that makes AI work reliably for business, turning your customer data into actionable intelligence. Let’s jump into CRM systems and strategies, and discover how to create a plan for your business.

What we'll cover:

• What is a CRM?
• What is a CRM strategy, and why is it important?
• Create your CRM strategy in 8 steps

A CRM system helps businesses manage interactions and relationships with potential and existing customers from one centralized platform. CRMs store customer information, manage touchpoints, create personalized sales and marketing campaigns, offer artificial intelligence (AI)-powered recommendations, and guide customer service interactions.

When a company uses a CRM, it can manage the entire customer journey across marketing, sales, commerce, customer service, and IT. CRMs help your customers experience a smoother path to purchase with more personalized service. Every team has a single source of truth for customer data, which helps reduce errors, lags in service, and customer frustration.

Using a CRM provides a win-win situation for both businesses and customers. And, like the majority of business technology, getting the most out of it requires a strategy.

A CRM strategy is a plan that businesses use to manage interactions with current and potential customers. It involves using data and technology to improve business relationships, enhance customer service, and increase sales.

Our research shows that 73% of customers say companies treat them like an individual rather than a number — a staggering leap from 39% in 2023. That means your CRM strategy needs to focus on organizing, automating, and synchronizing sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support. It should aim to understand your customer’s needs and behaviors and tailor interactions to build stronger relationships — whether delivered by human teams or AI agents working within your CRM framework.

For example, it doesn’t make sense for your small business team of five to pay for 50 users on a CRM platform. While you want a CRM that can scale as you grow, you need your CRM to fit your current needs and your future AI capabilities. So, let’s talk strategy on how to choose the best CRM for your needs.

Before you decide on a CRM, you need a good idea of what you want to do with this system. Creating an effective CRM strategy involves several key steps that help align business processes with customer needs while establishing the foundation for agentic AI capabilities.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to developing your CRM strategy:

First, clearly outline what you want to achieve with your CRM. Every business’s goals will be unique. They may include improving customer satisfaction, increasing sales, enhancing customer retention, or streamlining communication.

Next, define your target customer by gathering data to understand their needs, preferences, and behaviors. Segment your customers into groups based on similar characteristics to tailor your approach. Identify all the touchpoints where customers interact with your business, from initial contact to post-sale support. Understanding these journeys helps craft personalized customer experiences.

Based on the touchpoints and business objectives, decide on the types of customer data you need. Typically, this can be categorized into:

• Demographics: Age, gender, income, education
• Behavioral: Purchase history, product preferences, website navigation patterns, and engagement with marketing campaigns
• Transactional: Details of purchases, returns, and exchanges
• Interaction: Records of customer service interactions, feedback, and inquiries
• Psychographic: Customer lifestyles, values, and interests

Once data is collected, it can be analyzed to segment your team's processes and workflows. This segmentation helps to personalize marketing and sales strategies to meet the specific needs of your customers.

Establish clear processes for how customer information is handled and shared within your organization. This includes defining workflows that can be enhanced or automated by AI agents while maintaining proper governance and human oversight. Ensure that your CRM features support these processes to enhance efficiency and accuracy and that your workflow design enables both human teams and AI agents to work effectively within established business rules.

Consider how Agentic AI will integrate with your workflows — what tasks can be autonomously handled by AI agents, where human judgment is required, and how handoffs between AI and humans should occur to maintain seamless customer experiences.

Start by mapping out the customer journey, from awareness to purchase. Identify key touchpoints, motivations, and pain points at each stage. Outline the stages of your sales pipeline, typically including prospecting, qualification, proposal, negotiation, and closing. Each stage in your sales pipeline should correspond to a specific phase of the customer journey, all housed in your CRM.

AI models and automation rules are not set-and-forget. Regularly review their performance and impact on your business. You can do this by establishing CRM metrics to evaluate the success of your CRM strategy. It’s important to regularly analyze these metrics to understand what’s working and what isn’t. This could involve tracking customer satisfaction scores, sales growth, or customer retention rates. And, yes, you guessed it, all of this is done with your all-powerful CRM.

CRM systems should leverage advanced AI agents and CRM automation to handle routine tasks such as sending follow-up emails, scheduling appointments, and updating sales opportunities. Other examples include sending marketing emails to new website visitors or push notifications to a customer who has abandoned an item in their shopping cart. Automation helps reduce the workload on your team and ensures that no customer service issue is overlooked.

Start by identifying repetitive tasks that can be automated to save time and reduce human error. Use platforms like Agentforce to deploy autonomous agents that qualify leads, resolve customer issues, and even generate personalized content across multiple channels.

An AI CRM can also help identify patterns and trends in customer behavior, predict customer needs, and even forecast sales. These AI-powered insights inform your marketing and commerce strategies while enabling truly personalized customer interactions at scale.

Unlike traditional automation that simply follows predetermined rules, agentic AI can understand context, make decisions, and adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining full auditability and governance. The average company now uses over 900 apps across the organization, making intelligent integration and automation more critical than ever.

AI models and automation rules are not set-and-forget. Regularly review their performance and impact on your business. Establish CRM metrics to evaluate the success of your CRM strategy. It’s important to regularly analyze these metrics to understand what’s working and what isn’t. This could involve tracking customer satisfaction scores, sales growth, or customer retention rates. And, yes, you guessed it, all of this is done with your all-powerful CRM.

With this strategy, you’ve got your roadmap and you’re ready to use your CRM. A well-executed CRM strategy creates the foundation for intelligent customer experiences that drive measurable business growth. As AI continues to advance, your CRM becomes the trusted platform that enables both human teams and autonomous agents to deliver exceptional results together.

Whether you’re looking to streamline communication, optimize marketing campaigns, or enhance customer service, Salesforce CRM provides all the tools needed to reach your goals. With a great strategy, anything is possible. Get started with a free trial today.

Caylin White is an Editorial Lead and Growth Manager for Small Business at Salesforce. She has written content for over 15 years for many SaaS industries, like WordPress and BuzzSumo. She specializes in SEO but is sure to add a human-centric angle to every piece.