What is CRM? A Guide on Everything You Need to Know

Managing customer relationships is one of the most important aspects of business. Customer relationship management software (CRM) helps you with that.

What is CRM? How does it work? And why should you use a customer relationship management software solution?

In this post, you will find the answers to all these questions and more. You will learn everything you need to know about CRM and how to choose and implement a CRM solution for your business.

But first: why are we talking about CRM, anyway?

Customer relationship management software (CRM) is one of the fastest-growing technologies for businesses today and is set to change the business landscape. According to Statista, the market for CRM technology is set to reach $58.7 billion by 2026.

Image via Statista

It’s clearly not something you can ignore anymore. If you haven’t invested in a good CRM platform yet, then it’s about time that you do! This post will help you make the right choice.

So, let’s get started!

What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

CRM stands for customer relationship management.

When someone talks about CRM, they are referring to one of three things:

• CRM Software: The platform or solution that teams use to track the relationship between their company and customers/prospects.
• CRM Strategy: A detailed plan that dictates how a business will interact with customers and prospects, and manage customer relationships.
• CRM Process: A system that a business adopts to help manage customer relationships and nurture leads.

For most businesses, the process of managing customer relations is so intertwined with the tool that CRM is often used to refer to both.

So what is CRM software, anyway?

Here’s a more detailed definition.

What is CRM Software?

It is a platform that connects the different teams within your organization and integrates all their customer-related activities into one cohesive system. In other words, it collects all the customer information available within your company and collates it to form a holistic picture.

With a CRM in place, your marketing, sales, customer service, and other teams can access real-time client data for better customer interactions.

That means that anyone who wants to learn more about a particular customer can see their entire journey of interacting with your company.

Most CRM systems, by the way, work on cloud computing and SaaS technologies; more on that later.

First, let’s understand who the users of CRM technology are in the next section.

Who Should Use CRM Software?

Now that we’ve answered the “What is CRM?” question, you should understand who the typical users of a CRM platform are.

The short answer is that all businesses can and should use CRM tools to manage and improve customer relationships.

Given that every business needs to maintain good customer relationships as a matter of survival, CRM is useful for all businesses irrespective of their type and size.

One common myth is that the only businesses that invest in CRM tools are the ones that can afford them. That, however, is not true.

With cloud-based CRM systems, there are numerous options that fit varying budgets. You can opt for affordable and scalable CRM solutions that grow with your business.

Start with something that meets your basic needs, and upgrade as you record business growth.

How Does a CRM Software Solution Work?

Even if you have a basic understanding to answer the “What is CRM?” question, you might still find yourself asking this question:

How to use a CRM solution and what are its capabilities?

Well, a CRM solution collects customer data from various customer touchpoints within your organization and combines that to form a holistic picture of each customer.

The most common sources for customer data are the sales and marketing departments.

CRM tools don’t just collect data but also analyzes it to provide actionable insights. Your employees can use these insights to better interact with your customers and provide a delightful user experience.

So what features can you expect to find in your typical CRM software? Here’s a list.

• A reporting and analytics dashboard
• Data management, automation, and segmentation features
• Marketing and sales automation
• Client database containing detailed customer profiles
• Customer behavior tracking across channels like websites and ecommerce stores
• AI and ML tools to predict and suggest the best action for teams

With the above CRM features, businesses of all shapes and sizes can reap lots of benefits across their departments. For instance:

• Sales teams can better manage their sales pipeline and track deals.
• Marketing teams can get more visibility over leads and improve personalization.
• Customer service teams can manage their customer communications better across channels.
• HR teams can use CRM software to better track employee performance.

This next section discusses some specific benefits that businesses can get from using CRM solutions.

What are the Benefits of Using a CRM Solution?

Wondering what the point is of investing in a CRM platform when you’re perfectly capable of managing customer relationships yourself?

No matter how good you are at handling customers, from a business perspective, it’s always better to keep things extra organized to improve customer satisfaction.

Though you may be excellent at dealing with customers, you can’t possibly remember each customer and their past interactions with your business.

Also, as your business grows, there are so many repetitive tasks you’ll need to automate.

That’s where CRM comes into play. It can help you keep track of each customer and deliver the kind of personalized service, unmatched by any other competitor.

And that’s just scratching the surface. Let’s discuss the benefits of CRM in more detail.

Enhances Customer Relationships and Experience

When exploring the “What is CRM?” topic, it’s important to consider how it enhances the customer experience. As mentioned earlier, using a good CRM solution is what helps you deliver exceptional customer service and experiences.

How does it do that?

CRM provides your front-end employees with valuable information about each customer including their purchase history, complaints, feedback, and more.

And whenever any employee starts a customer interaction, they can access the customer’s profile and personalize their conversation. This helps sales teams provide better service throughout the entire customer journey.

Here are a few practical applications of CRM for enhancing customer satisfaction:

• Using insights from CRM, you can find engaging ways to keep in touch with your existing customers by sending them personalized updates, recommendations, offers, and more.
• By analyzing customer complaints and feedback, you can better understand their needs so that you can meet them.
• You can personalize your interactions with every customer to make them feel special and to build strong relationships with them.
• Use the data from past interactions to provide better customer support and quick problem resolution to improve the customer experience.

Hopefully, this answers your question regarding the point of investing in a CRM and encourages you to go for it.

Still not convinced?

Let’s discuss some of the other benefits of using a CRM (customer relationship management) solution to manage your interactions with customers.

Improves Customer Retention

Before we discuss how CRM can help with customer retention, let’s first understand some key reasons why customers leave a brand.

Besides poor quality products, which is the biggest reason to leave a brand, here are the two most common reasons:

1. Poor Customer Service: Customers are more likely to leave a brand if they don’t get good service consistently. Knowing your customer history helps in providing excellent customer service.
2. Lack of Personalization: A recent study found that 62% of customers would switch brands if they didn’t get a personalized experience.

Clearly, brands are mostly competing on the basis of customer satisfaction rather than actual products. Good-quality products are a given, but customers today want more than that—they want personalized interactions and quick problem resolution.

What CRM does on this front is help you provide consistent and personalized service across channels, improving your customer experience and, in turn, retention. This is crucial for developing meaningful customer relationships and building customer loyalty.

Enables Targeted Marketing

What is the main purpose of using a CRM (customer relationship management) platform?

To get in-depth, accurate, and timely customer information and insights…right?

Well, that also happens to be the most important thing you need for creating targeted marketing campaigns.

Here are some of the many customer information points that you can get from a CRM tool:

• Customer name
• Email address, phone number, etc.
• Social media profiles
• Demographics
• Purchase history
• Interaction history
• Complaints/feedback
• Survey responses
• Response to marketing campaigns

Based on this, you can easily understand what your customers’ needs and preferences are and design marketing campaigns that are most likely to resonate with those customers.

You can even create different audience segments and target customers with different marketing campaigns.

CRM (customer relationship management) can help you improve your marketing efforts in the following ways:

• Creating targeted content
• Sending personalized emails
• Creating engaging social media posts
• Building custom offers and promotions
• And a lot more!

It Helps With Lead Scoring

CRM can not only help you segment your prospects and customers, but can also prioritize them based on how likely they are to make a purchase.

Many sales professionals would agree that wasting time on unprofitable leads is both time-consuming and annoying.

Using a customer relationship management software solution can help you overcome this challenge by using lead scoring.

What is lead scoring?

It’s a technique in which you analyze your sales leads and give them scores based on how likely they are to convert.

What this means is that prospects with a high purchase intent will get high scores, while those who were just casually checking your products will get low scores. This can help your sales reps focus on the most promising potential customers.

So what is the point of performing this segmentation?

Lead scoring can help you prioritize your marketing and sales efforts on the most profitable leads first. This will, in turn, improve the effectiveness and conversion rate of your sales team.

Streamlines the Sales Process

Understanding the “What is CRM?” concept in the context of sales is crucial. A CRM software solution makes the entire sales process more streamlined and efficient.

As soon as new customers enter your sales cycle, you can track their journey using the data points from your CRM system.

Moreover, when leads are ready for conversion, the marketing team can seamlessly hand them over to the sales team so that everyone is on the same page and has access to the same CRM data.

Basically, what a CRM does is help you streamline the process by offering more visibility to teams and letting everyone see where a prospect is in your sales funnel.

Optimizes Productivity and Efficiency

A CRM solution allows the different teams within your organization to collaborate better.

As you know, different teams are involved in different stages of a customer lifecycle. By integrating all customer data in one place, CRM can enable different teams to be on the same page and to do their jobs more efficiently.

According to a study conducted by Forrester and commissioned by Salesforce, here are the common challenges faced by employees that adversely affect their productivity.

Image via Salesforce

All these problems can be solved by an integrated customer data and analytics platform, which is exactly what a CRM offers.

The same study also shows that 90% of executives and 94% of employees believe that a single source of information can help them create more value for their organizations.

Clearly, CRM’s benefits go beyond customer satisfaction and also help organizations perform better in their day-to-day operations.

That’s not all!

Many CRM software programs offer marketing automation features that you can use to further boost your team’s efficiency. These features help automate repetitive tasks, allowing your sales and marketing teams to focus on more strategic activities.

Now that you can comfortably answer the “What is CRM?” question and the benefits it offers, let’s discuss the different types of CRM.

Keep reading!

What Are the Different Types of CRM?

As we dig deeper into the “What is CRM?” topic, it’s important to understand that there are three different types of CRM systems, each serving specific business needs.

Let’s discuss each in more detail to help you understand which one is best suited for your requirements and can help you manage customer data most effectively.

Collaborative CRM

As the name suggests, a collaborative CRM system aims at breaking down organizational silos to help teams collaborate better. This is particularly useful for marketing and customer service teams that need to share information seamlessly.

Sometimes the various teams within an organization are separated by location. Other times, they just work separately, even if they’re physically in the same location.

The main problem that hinders collaboration is that each team works on different systems and has access to different information.

So what does a collaborative CRM software solution do to remedy such situations?

Well, it provides a single, integrated source of information for all teams. This way, everyone has access to relevant information, regardless of their location.

As most CRM solutions offer integrated customer data, all CRMs are collaborative in a way. However, operational and analytical CRM software provides more features as well.

What is it that they do?

Let’s find out.

Operational CRM

An operational CRM helps you track and visualize a customer’s journey and optimize your customer interactions accordingly.

It aims to improve the marketing, sales, and customer service processes by providing useful and timely information.

More than that, an operational CRM provides automation features that can automate routine and repetitive tasks. This enables your employees to focus on the more important aspects of their jobs.

Analytical CRM

The main focus of analytical CRM software, as the name suggests, is to analyze customer data and provide insights based on that. It goes a step further from collaborative CRM as it not only collects and organizes data, but also dissects it.

What’s more?

It can help you find common customer problems, see trends in customer buying behaviors, give insights into customer preferences, and more. This type of CRM is particularly useful for businesses looking to improve their marketing efforts and identify sales opportunities.

How to Choose a CRM Solution

So far, we’ve covered the burning “what is CRM?” question, why it matters, and what the different types of CRM are. Now, we’ve arrived at the most important part: how to evaluate the best CRM software for your business.

Identify Your Requirements

The first step towards CRM software selection is identifying what your requirements are.

Why?

It’s easy to get dazzled by the features offered by a tool and invest in it only to realize later that you never actually use all of those features.

So, it helps to identify and list your requirements before you begin your software search process. Your requirements will mostly depend on:

• The size of your business
• Your industry or niche
• The type of business you have
• Your budget
• The length & complexity of your sales pipeline

For example, if you have a small business with a fairly short sales pipeline, you can opt for a basic CRM just to manage and organize your customer data.

If you have a large business with multiple teams dealing with customers throughout their journey, however, you may want more collaborative features to manage customer data effectively.

Similarly, for a business with tons of customer data and no way to analyze it, an analytical CRM with advanced features will be needed.

So first, understand your business requirements and then start your search for the best CRM software. You will easily find a list of options through a simple Google search. Once you have that, move on to the next step.

Compare Different Options and Their Features

Once you have a list of options to choose from, you need to compare them based on their features and capabilities. Remember to look for the features that you need rather than going for the most premium CRM tools that offer tons of features you won’t ever use.

Here is a list of features, starting from the most basic to the most advanced. Take your pick of the essential CRM features that you require and then compare the CRM tools that offer those features and are within your budget.

Let’s get started.

Contact Management

This is a basic feature that almost all CRM software will offer. A CRM solution that not only stores customer information but organizes it well is very useful.

The point of comparison here will not be the feature itself, but how user-friendly the layout or dashboard is. Can you quickly find what you’re looking for?

Since every CRM solution will provide this feature, check the ease of use to shortlist the best ones.

Interaction Tracking

This is another common feature that almost all CRM platforms will offer.

What is interaction tracking?

It is a feature that allows you to track every interaction a customer has with your business across platforms. It helps you understand and remember each customer’s interaction history, which enables you to provide a better experience for them and improve customer engagement.

It also enables multiple teams to collaborate better and deliver a consistent customer experience across channels.

Lead Management

There are a lot of steps involved in lead generation, nurturing, and conversion. CRM can help you gain greater visibility into each customer’s buyer journey. This feature is crucial for sales teams to effectively manage and convert potential customers.

Check the CRM features specific to identifying, scoring, and moving leads down the sales funnel. The key here, again, is to compare how easily you can manage your leads using the CRM system.

Choose the platform that is easiest for you to use and improves your productivity.

Document Management

Document management is another basic feature that you will find in most of the options you may be considering.

What does this feature do?

As the name suggests, it allows you to collect, store, and organize documents in a central location that can be easily accessed by different teams.

If you have a large team, then this is a must-have feature for your business.

Proposal Management

This deals with sending quotes or proposals to prospective clients. It basically allows your sales team to track information about any client easily and send proposals on time.

This is a useful feature, especially if your business requires some back-and-forth with proposals and contracts.

Email Integration

This is just one of those CRM features that makes your life a whole lot easier.

As a business owner, you must know what it’s like to forget to send timely emails or respond to customer emails quickly. You should understand how inconvenient it can be and how it can make you lose important leads.

Integrating your email with your CRM platform just makes it easier for you to manage your email communications from a single dashboard.

Pipeline Management

Managing a sales pipeline is one of the most crucial tasks for your sales team that can be well-managed using a good CRM platform.

A good CRM platform will provide you with complete visibility over your entire sales process. With that visibility, you can see each customer or prospect and where they are in your sales pipeline.

What’s so important about that?

Well, it helps you manage each prospect according to their position in the pipeline and avoids losing leads as a result of a late response.

This feature is practically essential for businesses with a long sales pipeline and a direct sales component.

So far, we have discussed some of the basic or common features offered by most CRM software. Now, it’s time to discuss some of the more advanced features.

Keep reading to find out what they are.

Workflow Automation

What is workflow automation?

It is an advanced feature that allows you to automate repetitive tasks for your sales and marketing teams.

This allows your employees to focus on more important tasks and leaves the basics to technology. These could be reminders or alerts, automated responses to customers, follow-up messages and emails, and more.

This feature is mostly available in advanced or premium tools or in higher-tier packages of most tools.

Real-Time Data

While most CRM software collects and stores customer data from multiple sources, not all of them provide real-time data.

What is the importance of real-time data?

It allows you to make quicker and more accurate decisions than you would otherwise based on historical CRM data. After all, in a fast-paced business environment, it all comes down to timing.

Analytics & Reporting

This is a feature that you will find in analytical CRM but not in the basic collaborative ones.

Whether you want analytics capabilities or not will depend on your requirements. If you have a small business with a limited number of customers and customer data, then a CRM tool with simple reporting capabilities would do.

But for large businesses with tons of customers, it makes sense to invest in a top-notch analytical CRM software solution to gain insights into future market trends.

What is the process for comparing different options?

First, check the kind of analytics provided by each platform and how they report them. Platforms that provide easy-to-understand, visual reports are better. Further, tools that have a wider range of functions are more likely to provide you with more specific insights.

Also, keep in mind that not all platforms will provide the same level of analytics, even if they claim to be analytical CRM platforms. So, be sure to compare the number and quality of metrics and reports available on each platform.

Sales Forecasting

This is another advanced feature offered by premium tools.

So what is it and how does this help?

CRM software, with a sales forecasting functionality, can estimate future sales based on the data from your current sales pipeline.

With it, you can:

• Improve or change your marketing campaigns based on changing customer demand trends
• Focus more on products that are selling fast and maintain enough stock to meet the demand

Get a Demo or Free Trial

So now you’ve learned about the important features to consider when choosing a CRM solution and have compared different options.

What’s the next step?

You need to try out the shortlisted platforms and see which one best meets your needs.

How?

Most CRM software will either provide a demo or a free trial to help you understand their features and interface. Always try a platform before investing in it to assess how well it will work for your business.

This is especially important for cloud-based CRM solutions, as you’ll want to ensure the interface is intuitive and the features meet your specific needs.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s move on to the criteria for comparing your shortlisted options. There are three important aspects that you need to consider.

Let’s discuss each in detail.

User Interface

The first and most important criterion is the user interface and how easily you can use the platform.

One option may offer more features but be complicated to use; another might provide all the necessary features that you need and be easy to use.

What would you choose? We recommend the latter.

The reason is simple—you need to be able to use a platform to get the most out of it.

Always try a platform to get a feel of how easy or difficult it is to use and to see if you find the user interface intuitive.

Ease of Implementation

Another aspect that you need to consider is how easy or complex it is to set up the platform within your business processes.

You’ll need to check what resources a company provides to help new customers with the implementation process. Be sure to also check what level of support they will provide to set things up and train your employees.

Salesforce, for example, provides tons of useful information and guides to help with the initial setup. You will find everything you need there to start using the CRM platform with ease.

Integrations with Existing Systems

Last but not least, you should check the number and type of CRM integrations offered by your shortlisted platforms.

A CRM software solution should be able to integrate seamlessly with the other software and applications you use within your organization.

What can integrations do for your business?

They help you expand your CRM functionality or combine related functions. Depending on what your business needs, some important integrations include tools, such as accounting, payment processing, subscription management, etc.

Make the Final Choice

Once you have compared the CRM software based on features and ease of use, you should have a clear winner. If not, you might have to choose between 1-2 options.

So, what is the criterion for making the final decision?

If you have two tools that are similar in most aspects, it will likely come down to cost and customer support.

When comparing plans, always make sure that you’re doing a like-for-like comparison by gauging the key features provided within the plan. This is crucial for implementing a successful CRM strategy.

So what is it about cost and customer support that you should consider? The former is pretty straightforward.

But let’s look at each in more detail.

Budget

The CRM software solution that you pick should comfortably fit within your budget and also provide the functionalities you need.

When comparing plans, always make sure that you’re doing a like-for-like comparison by gauging the key features provided within the plan. Some tools may charge a little more, but they might offer a lot more features as well.

So do a thorough comparison, then take your pick.

Customer Support

Price, of course, is the obvious factor that most people consider when choosing between two similar options. However, you should also think about the level of customer support a company provides.

What is the process for finding that out?

First, check their website and see what kind of online support resources are available. If there are tons of resources like tutorials, guides, etc., then that’s a great sign.

Next, find out how you can reach their customer support team. Some will only provide phone support, while others may be available through multiple channels like email and live chat.

Also, find out how easy it is to reach their customer service representatives. Some companies provide 24/7 customer support while others are only available on weekdays.

Finally, read online reviews of the CRM platform that you’re interested in and see what people have said about their customer service. CRM software solutions that have more happy customers tend to be better than those with lots of negative reviews.

Compare the shortlisted options on these final two parameters and then make the final choice.

How to Set Up a CRM System

So, you’ve decided which CRM platform best suits your requirements. Now, the next step is to set up your CRM system and start using it.

Here’s a six-step process to do that.

Let’s discuss each step in detail to understand exactly how to set up your CRM system for business success and improve sales productivity.

Map the Customer Journey

Before you even start setting up your CRM, you need to understand and map your customers’ journey through your sales funnel. This helps you understand what you need your CRM to do so that you can set it up accordingly.

Find out the exact tasks that you need your CRM to perform at various stages of a buyer’s journey to enhance customer engagement.

Though the stages of a buyer’s journey remain the same for most businesses, it’s what happens at each stage that differs. What are the customer touchpoints at each stage of their journey? Which forms of marketing communication do you use at different stages?

Here’s an example of a customer journey map:

Image via invesp

What is the purpose of doing this?

It helps you understand what you need your CRM to do so that you can set it up accordingly. Find out the exact tasks that you need your CRM to perform at various stages of a buyer’s journey.

Then, move on to the next step.

Define the Sales Process

Where do most of your leads come from? Which pages drive the most conversions? At what point are leads handed over by the marketing team to the sales team?

Ask yourself these questions to understand your sales cycle and exactly how it works.

Why?

Well, you can only set up your CRM to help your sales and marketing teams if you understand your sales process end-to-end.

For example, let’s say that most of your leads come from your website. You can set up your CRM to track the leads from your website, what actions they take on your site, and how they convert.

After all, the core job of a CRM software solution is to capture customer data. You just need to tell it which data points are the most important for you.

Set Up Custom Fields, Stages, and Pipelines

Until now, you’ve simply understood your processes. This is the actual stage where the information gathered in the first two steps will be used to set up your CRM.

At this stage, you need to set up custom fields for your CRM.

Custom fields are the different data points that store customer information. Some commonly used custom fields are:

• Name
• Email address
• Date of birth/age
• Phone number
• Date of first purchase/subscription
• Job title

These fields are used to capture information about your customers, so you can choose to add whichever fields are relevant to your business.

Next, you need to set up the various stages of your sales process in the CRM.

The generic stages of a typical sales process range from awareness to conversion. However, you should make these as specific to your business as possible.

For example, if your business deals with direct sales, your stages could be:

• Cold call/initial outreach
• First meeting/product demonstration
• Sending proposal/quote
• Contract review
• Deal validation

You have your stages. What now?

You’ll need to organize the various stages of your sales process into pipelines. Once the objective of a stage is fulfilled, leads can move to the next stage in the pipeline.

One word of caution:

Don’t make your pipelines too complex just for the sake of adding as many stages as possible. Keep things simple in order to set up your CRM for business success.

Upload Your Customer Data to the CRM

Now comes the most important part—adding your customer data to your CRM platform.

The previous three steps prepared you for this data entry so that your data becomes useful after you migrate it to the platform.

So, what’s the process for migrating your customer data?

The most common way to do this is to import all the data into a .csv file and upload that to the CRM platform. It enables you to import segmented customer lists and tags as well, making the process easy and efficient.

Some CRM platforms also offer the service to handle data migration, so you don’t have to worry about anything.

Once this is done, you need to add customers to the right pipelines to put your CRM to use.

Pro Tip: Use the learning resources provided by the CRM vendor to properly migrate your customer data and add it to pipelines.

Integrate with Other Tools

Now that you have added all the data and set up custom fields and pipelines, you’re a few steps ahead. All you need to do now is integrate it with other tools before you can start using your CRM platform.

Which apps and tools should you integrate with?

Here are some types of integrations you should consider:

• Social media
• Email marketing
• Web analytics
• Appointments and scheduling
• Forms and sign-ups
• Online shopping

When all the systems that you use are integrated with your CRM, it makes the process much more efficient and streamlined.

What’s more?

Integrations allow your CRM to capture customer data from various sources. So, the information from all your tools and platforms will feed directly into your CRM to provide a holistic view of each customer. This is particularly useful for sales and marketing activities.

There are three types of integrations that you need to do. Let’s look at each one of them.

1. Direct Integrations

These are the integrations provided directly by the CRM vendors that can be done from the platform itself.

2. Third-Party Integrations

These are done using a third-party or middleman to connect your CRM with another tool. Such connections would not be possible without a middleman.

3. API Integrations

When you use the platform’s code to make custom connections, those are called API integrations. For this, you need to check to see if your CRM vendor provides API access or not.

Add Users and Set Permissions

Your relevant integrations are now in place. What’s next?

Your CRM is ready to use.

Simply add users to your CRM system and give them access to the relevant information. You can set up permissions to allow only the relevant users access to certain information.

This should be done based on a user’s role and what information they would need to perform their job well.

That’s it!

You’re all set to start using your new CRM. But before you do that, you should learn some of the most important best practices for using a CRM solution.

Have a look at what those are in this next section.

Best Practices for Using a CRM Solution Properly

At this stage, you should be ready to start using your CRM platform. You will, with time, make a few mistakes and learn from them.

However, you could also learn the best practices for using a CRM solution the right way and avoid any CRM mistakes to begin with!

These practices will help you build customer loyalty and potentially increase sales revenue.

So, what are these best practices?

Let’s find out.

Train Your Employees to Use the CRM

You simply cannot take on a heavy task like implementing a CRM system without training your employees on how to use it. This doesn’t refer to a last-minute crash course on how to use the platform, but rather a comprehensive training program.

Ideally, you should start preparing your employees for the upcoming changes to their day-to-day operations in advance. This is crucial for both sales teams and customer support teams.

A complex CRM system can help manage your entire marketing and sales pipeline. But if you don’t train your employees well, it will just end up being an expensive data storage or filing system.

Avoid that trap! Train your employees well to get the most out of your new CRM platform. This will help your sales teams better manage sales leads and improve overall customer engagement.

Keep Your Access Rules Simple

First, it’s important to set some user permissions for your CRM system as not everyone should have access to sensitive data.

So, you need to assess who needs access to what level of customer data to do their jobs well and then set those rules accordingly.

This, however, does not mean that you take this segmentation on such a granular level that you are setting different rules for different individuals. The more complex your access rules, the more difficult it will be to track if you have any problems.

So, what should you do?

Set a few levels of access and then segment your employees into those limited categories. This should serve your purpose while keeping things simple.

Organize Your Data Within the CRM

There are two components to this—keeping things organized and tracking any new changes.

If you have set up your CRM system well, then your data will be properly organized within the system.

But remember: you need to ensure that you’re able to track any changes made in your system by setting up notifications and alerts.

Get Feedback From Your CRM Users

Once your teams start using the CRM system, ask them for feedback. After all, the actual users will have the deepest insights into what is working and what can be improved.

Take regular feedback from your CRM users to keep improving and optimizing your CRM system further.

Make a special note of process improvements that they recommend as that can be very beneficial for your business.

Automate Where Possible

If your CRM system can automate certain tasks, then use it.

Sales and marketing automation helps save time and makes processes more efficient. If you can automate repetitive tasks, then it will free up your employees’ time to focus on more nuanced work.

The chances of human error are often high for tedious tasks like data entry. Automation can not only help you get things done faster but also more accurately.

FAQs

Q1. What is CRM and how does it work?

CRM stands for customer relationship management and can be used to refer to both the process and the platforms used for it. More often than not, CRM refers to the software used for managing customer relationships.

Here’s how CRM works:

CRM systems work by collecting customer information and data from various sources within an organization

It collates this data to create detailed customer profiles or personas

Then, it analyzes this data to provide valuable customer insights that can be used for strategic business decisions

Using a CRM, you can access detailed information about any customer or do a bulk analysis to score leads, streamline the sales process, and more.

Q2. What are the 3 types of CRM?

The three types of customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are:

• Collaborative CRM: Aimed at providing a single source of information to all teams for better collaboration.
• Operations CRM: Focusses on improving operations and sales processes by automating tasks
• Analytical CRM: Provides in-depth customer insights to fuel strategic business decisions.

Choose the right type of CRM based on your business requirements instead of thinking that a high price signifies a better fit.

Q3. What is a CRM system example?

Salesforce is a good example of a CRM system. It is used for managing customer data and improving customer relationships and experiences.

There are many good CRM platforms available on the market. However, no one platform can be the best option for every business.

So, identify your requirements first and then choose the best solution that meets those requirements.

Q4. What type of software is CRM?

It is a kind of data tracking and management software used for managing customer data. CRM technology is one of the most important parts of any business, as it integrates with other systems to collect and analyze customer data.

Q5. Why is CRM needed?

A customer relationship management platform allows businesses to manage their customer data and use it to their advantage.

Many businesses have tons of customer data stored in silos but unused to drive strategic business decisions. A CRM solution allows such businesses to organize and analyze this data to gain valuable insights from it.

Q6. What is the advantage of CRM?

Here are the key benefits of CRM:

• Enhances customer experience
• Improves customer retention
• Enables targeted marketing
• It helps with lead scoring
• Streamlines the sales process
• Optimizes productivity and efficiency

Using a CRM solution to manage your customer data can be the difference between success and failure for your business. So, identify your requirements and choose a CRM solution that helps you deliver a better customer experience and develop customer relationships.

Q7. What is the process for CRM software selection?

Here is the step-by-step process for choosing the right customer relationship management tool for your business:

• Identify your business requirements: Which type of CRM do you need, and which features will help your teams perform better?
• Compare different options: Compare the features offered by different platforms and shortlist the ones that best match your requirements.
• Try them out: Get a free trial or demo of your shortlisted options and compare them based on their ease of use and user interface.
• Make the final choice based on considerations like price and the quality of customer support offered by different vendors.

Q8. What are the important features of CRM software?

Here are some of the key features of CRM software that you can use to compare different options:

• Contact Management – Capturing, organizing, and using the customer contact information to help aid business processes.
• Interaction Tracking: Tracking customer interactions with a business and maintaining a profile of each customer and their histories.
• Lead Management: Aiding lead generation, nurturing, scoring, and conversion processes for a business.
• Document Management: Storing and organizing all important documents for specific teams and making it easy for relevant users to access them.
• Proposal Management: Optimizing the process for sending proposals and tracking the status of different clients and proposals.
• Email Integration: Integrating with an email marketing automation platform to send automated emails and responses to customers.
• Pipeline Management: Managing and optimizing the entire sales pipeline end-to-end, from lead generation to conversion.
• Workflow Automation: Automating routine tasks to create efficient workflows.
• Real-Time Data: Tracking customer interactions with a business in real-time and providing updated data to drive business decisions.
• Analytics & Reporting: Analyzing customer data to provide valuable insights in the form of easy-to-understand reports.
• Sales Forecasting: Predicting future sales based on the current pipeline and customer data.

Q9. What is the difference between CRM and ERP?

While both systems work in a similar way—collecting and organizing customer data—the key difference between the two is the end-users. ERP is mainly used by the financial department while CRM is used by the marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

ERP deals with customers’ financial data, while CRM integrates all customer data to provide a more holistic view.

Q10. What is the best CRM platform?

There is no one platform that can suit every business’ unique requirements. So, you need to find the answer for your business by comparing the different options available.

Some of the most popular platforms, however, are Salesforce, Keap, HubSpot CRM, and Zoho CRM.

Conclusion

Hopefully, by now you’ve got your answers to the important questions about CRM like:

• What is CRM?
• Why should you invest in it?
• How can you best use it for your business?
• And more!

Now, it’s time to do the hard work of finding the best CRM platform for your business using the selection guide mentioned above. First, identify your requirements, and then compare the most suitable platforms to find the one that best fits your needs.

Whether you’re looking to manage marketing campaigns, implement sales force automation, or simply improve customer satisfaction, the right CRM can help you achieve your goals.

Be sure to follow the best practices for implementing and using a CRM platform to get the most benefits from it. All the best!