What Is CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?

CRM stands for customer relationship management, which 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.

What we’ll cover:

• Who is CRM for?
• Why is a CRM system important for your business?
• What are the benefits of CRM?
• What does a CRM system do?
• How much does a CRM cost?

CRM software is used by 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 nonprofit, if you communicate with customers — and your employees rely on information about those customers — a CRM system 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.

Doing business has become complicated. The average organisation uses close to 1,000 different applications — but only 28% 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 why using a CRM database is important for your business.

Customer relationship management software like Salesforce CRM 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.

Having a single source of truth doesn’t just benefit customers: It keeps companies organised and focused on revenue-generating 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.

Using CRM software means less administrative work…and more time to focus on sales.

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.

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 — and even some things you didn’t know — which can be used to personalise every interaction. Having this level of knowledge makes every employee even smarter and more productive, especially when you use AI agents that can take action autonomously based on the instructions you provide.

AI agents 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.

CRMs that have AI give employees the power to make more accurate predictions around forecasts like quarterly sales targets, ecommerce sales, or the best time to send a marketing email.

There are many benefits of using CRM software — especially when your business combines CRM with AI and data you can trust. Here are just a few of them:

The ability to easily share data across your teams is a huge benefit to both your customers and your business. A CRM provides everyone at your company with a simple, customisable user interface with real-time updates they can use to serve customers. So when a customer calls in with a question, the service agent can see their entire history, past marketing offers, and previous purchases. The CRM can even offer up suggestions for new products the customer may like, based on trends and insights uncovered by AI. A CRM with messaging capabilities that incorporates your customer data makes it even easier to communicate across your teams, with the data you need to collaborate right at your fingertips.

Introducing a CRM platform has been shown to produce real results across a business. It helps employees save time, work more efficiently, unlock opportunities, and serve customers better. Using Salesforce CRM, global customers across all business sizes have a proven track record of success, including:

An AI CRM will help your business grow. It can make your employees more efficient, serve your customers better, and find new opportunities you may not see on your own. AI agents can help employees be more productive and serve customers better, with the ability to autonomously provide 24/7 customer service, engage with prospects, provide personalised product recommendations, and more.

CRM software helps employees get more done, faster. With CRM automation you can streamline complex, multi-user processes into simple workflows. Plus, fully integrated productivity platforms such as (Slack) provide a single place where employees can collaborate right in the flow of work and automate processes. With the help of AI, the best CRM software can automatically generate workflows to create even better experiences.

By understanding your customers better, cross-selling and upselling opportunities become clear — giving you the chance to win new business from your existing accounts and to build lasting, more profitable relationships. With more visibility, you can keep your customers happy with better service. Happy customers become repeat customers, and repeat customers spend more.

Today's customers expect fast, personalised support at any time of day or night. A CRM system can help you provide the high-quality service that customers are looking for. Your service representatives can quickly access a customer’s record of all past interactions so they can provide quick, informed answers and service.

A good CRM system will gather information from a large variety of sources across your business and beyond. So in addition to providing information about individual customers, it can serve as a listening engine. Using AI can give you unprecedented insights into how people feel and what they are saying about your organisation. This helps you improve your offerings, spot problems early, and identify gaps.

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. With automation, CRM can help you collect even more information faster, like news about your accounts, so that everyone stays up to date.

Customer relationship management software provides businesses with tools that help them communicate better — both internally, and with customers. Here’s how:

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 a cloud CRM 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.

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.

As we mentioned, the average company uses close to 1,000 apps — most of which can’t talk to each other. A CRM platform can connect with other business apps that help you to develop customer relationships. CRMs integrate with your favourite business tools, such as document signing, accounting, and billing, and surveys, so that information flows both ways to give you a true 360-degree view of your customer.

The latest CRM systems have built-in intelligence and trusted AI. They use your customer data to create customisable, predictive, and generative AI experiences that automate administrative tasks like data entry and lead or service case routing. Automatically generated insights or service call recaps help you understand your customers better, even predicting how they will feel and act so that you can prepare the right outreach. AI can even help you to find opportunities that may be hidden in your business data.

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.

Try Salesforce free for 30 days.

When you start to integrate successful CRM strategies using your chosen tools, there’ll likely be a learning curve. To make things easier, create a basic strategy upfront before you put your solution to work.

What are your goals, and how do you intend to achieve them? Hone in on your objectives, as these will determine how you tailor your CRM solution for your business.

You likely already know your target audiences but take the time to refine your understanding by creating an ideal buyer persona. This customer information is a useful way to learn how you’ll be employing your CRM solution to achieve results.

What are the steps in your sales pipeline? How do your audience travel from awareness to conversion? How many touchpoints do they engage with, and how long does it take for a lead to travel between stages? Map out your customer journey to form the foundation of your CRM.

Before you launch up your CRM, determine who will play a role in running, updating, and managing your software. Depending on the size of your sales and marketing team, you can also assign individual roles, such as data management and system maintenance.

You should align your team on best practices any time you integrate a new platform into your workflow. Explain your goals, how you want to use the software, and how responsibilities will change once it is implemented.

Your CRM system depends on high-quality data. Integrate processes to collect data from various sources and ensure your existing customer data is clean and properly catalogued.

With these six steps, you’ll be prepared to integrate a CRM solution into your organisation.

Let’s discuss how to actually put your CRM tool to work. Here are some of our top CRM tips for setting up and using your software platform.

Ultimately, your CRM is going to be your sales team’s best friend. The sooner you can get them familiar with the platform, the better. Add them as users to the platform and explain why the software will be valuable so everyone is on the same page.

At this preliminary stage, you should also add all of your existing prospects, leads, and customers. This process will help your CRM system catch up with your current sales and marketing strategy.

Your CRM needs to mirror your goals and sales pipeline. Create several deal stages in your CRM solution to match the customer journey you mapped out earlier. You should also develop tailored properties that you want to track. For instance, you might want to add customer fields for email addresses, products purchased, billing IDs, or currencies.

The beauty of a CRM is that it centralises all of your teams and data in one place. However, to leverage that benefit, you should integrate all of your current form builders, social media accounts, and business platforms into your CRM. This will streamline your entire sales cycle, making the process of gathering and nurturing leads more efficient.