What is CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?
Let's define CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a system for managing all of your company’s interactions with current and potential customers. The goal is simple: improve relationships to grow your business. CRM technology helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.
When people talk about CRM, they’re usually referring to a CRM system: software that helps track each interaction you have with a prospect or customer. That can include sales calls, customer service interactions, marketing emails, and more.
CRM tools can unify customer and company data from many sources and even use AI (artificial intelligence) to help better manage relationships across the entire customer lifecycle, spanning departments like marketing, sales, digital commerce, and customer service interactions.
That’s the CRM definition. So why is CRM important, and who can benefit? Let’s take a look at:
Who is CRM for?
CRM software is for companies and industries of all sizes. It benefits large enterprises that need to easily track customer activity in one place and share it across departments, small businesses that often need to do more with less, and startups looking to be nimble and efficient. No matter your industry, or even if you’re a non-profit, if you communicate with customers — and your employees rely on information about those customers — CRM tools can help.
Customer relationship management software can benefit virtually any department at your company, from sales to service, to IT, to marketing, and more. Whether you want to start big or start small, it's easier to get started than you might think.
Why is a CRM system important for your business?
Doing business has become complicated. The average organisation uses over 1,000 different applications — but less than 30% of these apps are integrated.
To stay ahead, your company needs to be centred around your customers and enabled by the right technology. But getting up-to-date, reliable, and actionable information can be tricky. How do you translate the many streams of data coming in from sales, customer service, marketing, and social media into useful business information?
With a CRM solution, of course. Here are just a few reasons a CRM is important for your business.
A single source of truth
Customer relationship management software can give you a clear, unified customer profile — a single, simple, secure, and customisable dashboard with a customer’s purchase history, order status, outstanding customer service issues, and more. This information can be invaluable, especially since 70% of customers expect every representative they contact to know their purchase and issue history.
Whether they’ve previously reached out via phone, chat, email, or social media, a single source of truth ensures everyone at your company can provide the expected level of service.
Cost savings
Having a single source of truth doesn’t just benefit customers. It keeps companies organised and focused on revenue-driving activities. Sales teams generate a flood of data while talking to prospects, meeting customers, and collecting valuable information.
If all that information gets stored in handwritten notes, laptops, or inside the heads of your salespeople, there can be serious cost implications. Details can get lost, action items aren’t followed up on promptly, and customers get prioritised based on guesswork rather than data. And if someone leaves the company, unless their contacts and notes are saved in a CRM, that information — and business — may disappear along with them.
A CRM means less administrative work… and more time to focus on driving sales.
Connecting all your teams
A CRM brings your teams together, sharing information that makes everyone’s job easier.
For example, marketers can use CRM tools to manage campaigns and lead customer journeys with a data-driven approach. CRM software provides visibility into every opportunity or lead, showing you a clear path from inquiries to sales. Then, commerce teams can serve up personalised offers on your website, while customer service already knows a customer's history if they reach out with questions.
Increasing productivity with AI
Some of the biggest gains can come from combining CRM with the power of AI. Doing so enables you to quickly pull together everything you know about a customer, which can be used to personalise every interaction. Having this level of knowledge makes every employee even smarter and more productive. It equips them with insights to make more accurate predictions around forecasts like quarterly sales targets, ecommerce sales, or the best time to send a marketing email.
Generative AI can help speed up tasks for teams across your business, too. Labor-intensive tasks like drafting sales emails, crafting marketing messages, and writing or localising product descriptions can now be done in a matter of seconds.
What are the benefits of CRM?
Here’s how a CRM system can help your business today
1. Connect Your Business Silos.
2. Make Improvements To Your Bottom Line.
3. Increase customer lifetime value.
4. Offer Better Customer Support.
5. Improve Products And Services.
6. Accelerate work with automation.
7. Use AI to identify trends and efficiencies.
What does a CRM system do?
CRM lets you store customer and prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, record service issues, and manage marketing campaigns, all in one central location that’s available to stakeholders at your company. It does this by organising customer and prospect information in a secure, easy-to-use digital record with information like a contact’s email, telephone, social media handle, all previous interactions with your company, and more.
CRM helps you find new customers, win their business, and keep them happy and can use automation to help you collect even more information faster, like news about your accounts so that everyone stays up to date.
Key features of a CRM
Flexibility, security, and lower costs with a cloud CRM.
Unlike the early days, today’s CRM software lives in the cloud, giving you the ability to safely save and access all of your customer data from anywhere at any time. That means every employee has the same information in real-time, and can make updates wherever they are.
Shifting to the cloud also means that a CRM system is easy to implement. There’s no hardware, which significantly reduces costs. Installation and ongoing management is an easy lift for IT teams, since there are no frustrating version control issues or updates to schedule. And, with cloud-based CRM, you only pay for the number of seats you use and features you need. As your business grows, you can add more of both, enabling your CRM to scale along with your plans.
Moving to the cloud has changed CRM in countless ways. Now anyone can work from anywhere on any device, boosting collaboration and bringing down costs. Plus, it offers enhanced security, so your customer and company data is always safe.
Unified view of the customer.
With a consolidated view of every prospect and customer, CRM software can manage day-to-day customer activities and interactions. For marketing, this means engaging your prospects with the right message, at the right time, through targeted digital marketing campaigns and journeys. Sales reps can work faster and smarter with a clear view of their pipeline and accomplish more accurate forecasting.
Commerce teams can quickly launch and scale ecommerce — from online orders to curbside pickup — for their consumer shoppers (B2C commerce) and business buyers (B2B commerce). And customer service agents can respond to customer needs on any channel — from the office, at home, or in the field.
Connects with your other apps.
Trusted AI is built-in.
How much does a CRM cost?
There are many ways that customer relationship management software can make a big impact on your business. But that doesn’t mean the cost has to be big. CRM products and services are made for businesses of all sizes and to meet needs across all areas of a company. Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, it’s easy to get started.
Have a look at the Salesforce pricing page to see an overview of CRM costs based on the size of your business and the products that are right for your needs.
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