A CRM manager keeps your CRM organised, improves data quality and gives leadership reliable information for decision-making.
As your business grows, the data system you’re working with can become harder to maintain. Outdated contacts accumulate, deal stages lose consistency and reports become less accurate. When this starts affecting day-to-day work, it’s usually a sign you’re ready for someone dedicated to managing and improving the system.
In this article, you’ll learn what a CRM manager does, what to look for when hiring one and how Pipedrive can support them in building a CRM that’s accurate, efficient and easy for your team to use.
Key takeaways from how to hire a CRM manager
A strong CRM manager combines technical ability with the people skills needed to manage your database, support better workflows and keep teams aligned.
In growing companies, CRM managers create leverage by spotting problems early – duplicated data, slow stages, weak routing, or poor usage patterns – long before they become lost revenue.
When hiring a CRM manager, the most helpful interview signals are the ones that show how a candidate thinks through real CRM issues. Practical tests reveal far more than traditional interview questions.
Pipedrive helps CRM managers do their best work by removing busywork, automatically capturing new leads and providing a clear, visual picture of their sales process. Sign up for Pipedrive’s 14-day free trial to help your new hire get up to speed faster.
What is a CRM manager and when do you need one?
CRM manager definition: A CRM manager oversees your customer relationship management (CRM) system, keeps customer data accurate and uses reporting insights to support sales and marketing. The role of a CRM manager also includes training your team, maintaining clean processes and ensuring your CRM is reliable enough for confident decision-making.
As the importance of CRM systems grows, so does the need for someone to own them. CRM solutions are increasingly seen as table stakes, and Pipedrive’s State of Sales and Marketing Report for 2023/24 shows that 87% of companies rely on one to stay organised and keep deals moving.
As more reps, leads and workflows enter the system, the CRM becomes harder to keep clean and consistent, which helps explain why 44% of companies now employ someone focused on CRM data quality.
Here are some common signs that you need to hire a CRM manager:
Signs you need a CRM manager | How they help |
You’re a large company, or you’re growing rapidly. The volume of your customer data is becoming hard to handle. | Organizing past customer interactions so you can customize future conversations to their business needs. |
| Pulling insights from lead behavior, rep activity and patterns in your pipeline. They then embed those insights into your sales process. |
| Streamlining your sales process by mapping hand-off points, reducing stage bloat and fixing data routing so deals move smoothly from one owner to the next. |
| Assigning each lead to one rep and routing all conversations to that person. They’ll also set up alerts that trigger automatically if a lead is duplicated. |
For companies with complex deal flows and sales processes, hiring a CRM manager quickly pays for itself.
What should you look for when you hire a CRM manager?
Here are six core capabilities to look for in a CRM manager.
Understanding of marketing principles
A CRM manager should have a solid grounding in core marketing concepts, such as segmentation and lead scoring.
This background helps them align CRM processes with your company’s priorities and interpret data in a way that genuinely supports sales, marketing and customer service teams.
When a CRM manager understands how your teams target and nurture leads, they can make practical choices about segments, prioritisation and campaign structure in ways that actually support those data-driven workflows.
Without this foundation, a new hire may set up processes that look tidy in the system but don’t drive real sales outcomes – something that slows growth and creates friction for the teams who rely on the CRM every day.
To assess a candidate’s level of marketing knowledge:
Consider whether you’ll benefit more from deep experience in your industry or from broader, cross-industry exposure.
Explain how you currently segment leads and ask what they would change or streamline.
Give a short assignment where they score leads for a fictional startup.
These checks help you see whether they can translate marketing theory into workflows that support your sales process.
Analytical ability
A CRM manager needs to be comfortable working with data and spotting patterns in your pipeline, activities and conversions.
They should be able to turn that analysis into a CRM strategy that supports accurate forecasting and helps teams understand where they’re losing momentum.
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When a CRM manager is confident in analyzing your data, they can identify slow stages, inconsistent activity and structural issues that limit conversions. Without this, reporting becomes surface-level, and your team ends up guessing the right next move.
To assess a candidate’s analytical ability:
Walk them through a simple pipeline report and ask what stands out or concerns them.
Share an example of inconsistent data and see how they would diagnose the issue.
Ask for concrete examples of where they improved a metric through data analysis.
A CRM manager with strong analytical skills will lean on data to make recommendations that genuinely help teams identify, prioritise and progress opportunities.
Communication skills
Choose a CRM manager who can clearly explain insights and processes to different teams. Clear communication helps new workflows gain adoption and keeps your CRM consistent over time.
CRM managers need good communication skills to lead internal training sessions and present findings in a way that sales, marketing and technical colleagues can easily understand and apply.
When teams understand why specific steps matter, they’re more likely to follow the process and keep data clean. Without that clarity, adoption can drop, data becomes inconsistent and leaders lose confidence in the CRM platform reports they depend on to make decisions.
To assess a candidate’s interpersonal skills:
Ask them to walk a senior colleague through a change that needs to be made to a complex CRM process.
Have them outline how they would onboard a new rep to your CRM.
Share a recent process change and ask how they would present it to the team.
By looking for a CRM manager with strong interpersonal skills, you’ll make sure they can support teams through new or evolving CRM practices.
Attention to detail
A CRM manager should care deeply about data accuracy. Clean, consistent customer data ensures everyone can trust the reports and that workflows run as expected.
When a CRM manager pays attention to detail, they catch duplicates, outdated values and incorrect assignments before they affect performance. Marketing campaigns, sales forecasting and customer segmentation all rely on clean customer information.
Without this skill, the system would become cluttered with outdated or flawed information. Your CRM loses reliability and sales teams become less confident in the information they use every day.
To test a candidate’s attention to detail:
Ask them to describe a process they implemented to improve data management in a previous role.
Give them a small CRM data export and ask what they’d correct.
Include a random word like “woodchuck” in the job description and ask them to mention it in their application.
A detail-oriented CRM manager protects the level of accuracy your CRM needs and maintains its value as a decision-making tool.
Proficiency with your CRM
A CRM manager should understand how your data management system is structured and how changes to fields, pipelines or automations affect day-to-day work.
Experience with other CRMs is often transferable, but it won’t teach candidates the specifics of your specific setup. They may understand pipelines and automations, but the vendor-specific settings or reporting formats your small business relies on will still be new.
When a CRM manager understands your CRM well, they can spot configuration problems quickly and streamline workflows based on how your reps perform. Without this, teams waste time navigating confusing layouts, broken automation or inconsistent data entry.
By contrast, someone without that experience will take more time to train and will waste resources while learning through trial and error.
To assess a candidate’s CRM software proficiency:
Show part of your current setup and ask what they’d refine.
Give them test tasks in a sandbox environment during the hiring process.
Ask them to walk through how they’ve structured a pipeline in a past role.
Hiring a manager who knows your CRM inside and out reduces training time and maximizes the platform’s value from day one.
Relevant degree
A degree in a related field, such as business or marketing, shows the candidate has the theoretical knowledge to understand why specific processes and strategies matter.
This background helps them understand how CRM data connects to broader commercial goals and makes it easier to communicate with the teams they support.
When a CRM manager has formal training in these areas, they can interpret data with greater confidence and understand the reasoning behind workflows, handoffs, and reporting structures.
Without that grounding, they may rely too heavily on the CRM tool itself rather than the business context it serves or need extra guidance on strategic thinking.
To assess the value of a candidate’s degree:
Look at how their studies relate to the work you expect them to do: data-heavy degrees often help with reporting, while business or marketing degrees support cross-team alignment.
Ask if they’ve used frameworks to map out a customer journey.
Ask how their education shaped the way they approach problem-solving or process design.
These checks give you a sense of whether their academic background supports the type of CRM decisions your team relies on.
How Pipedrive makes a CRM manager more efficient
Pipedrive is purpose-built for growing SMBs.
It’s quick to set up, easy to customize and flexible enough to accommodate any workflow. It also scales smoothly with CRM integrations that keep all your tools connected.
With a CRM manager in place, the platform becomes even more powerful: they can work faster, fine-tune processes, keep data clean and ensure the system works the way your teams actually sell.
With automation, AI and clear visual overviews, Pipedrive reduces the manual work that normally slows CRM managers down. That means less time spent on admin and more on improving your sales process.
Pipedrive in action: The Container Team replaced their old CRM, which was overly complex and poorly maintained, with Pipedrive. After migrating, the team saw a 15% increase in conversion rate, an 18% rise in year-over-year revenue, and a 34% increase in net profit.
Here are six ways Pipedrive makes a CRM manager’s work even more effective.
See where customers are dropping off
Pipedrive helps CRM managers spot bottlenecks at a glance, so they can understand exactly where deals slow down and why.
It displays deals as cards in columns representing each stage of your sales process. This functionality gives CRM managers a quick, accurate snapshot of pipeline health without digging through reports:
The Kanban format helps CRM managers follow deal progression in a way that’s simple to interpret and act on. If a lead is ever in the wrong column, they can easily correct it by dragging and dropping its card into the right place.
Pipedrive highlights overdue deals, helping CRM managers identify potential problems. For example:
If leads accumulate in the first column with no scheduled activities, sales should focus more on sending follow-up emails or clarifying which lead is assigned to which salesperson.
If potential customers often drop out between the proposal and negotiation stages, your proposals aren’t customer-centric enough, or your offers aren’t aligning with market norms.
CRM managers can customize Pipedrive’s visual format to match the company’s unique sales workflow and customer behavior. They can add or remove stages to your pipeline, rename or reorder them and set a probability for closing in each one.
At the level of each deal, they can also add fields for dropdowns, text fields and monetary values to ensure your salespeople have all the information they need.
Spend less time chasing up leads
When reps forget to add leads or log conversations, the CRM manager ends up patching gaps manually. It slows down their work and reduces data quality.
Automatic capture fixes this problem at the source.
Pipedrive offers several ways to capture leads and move them into the CRM automatically, saving your CRM manager hours of follow-up and giving them a complete, accurate view of pipeline activity.
Here’s how these channels work:
Chatbot: Talks to leads 24/7 and records conversation details in your CRM.
Live Chat: Connects leads with reps and stores their information in your CRM when the chat ends.
Prospector: Crawls a database of over 400 million leads for you, and puts the best ones into your CRM automatically.
Web forms: When a lead fills out a form on your site, the software instantly passes their details to your CRM.
Once their data is in your CRM, your CRM manager can manage all your leads from a single, central location, without having to chase missing information across the team.
Note: These features are available via the LeadBooster add-on. Using them together helps your CRM manager reduce manual lead entry and maintain a more reliable, up-to-date pipeline.
Eliminate busywork with AI
Before the integration of AI into CRM, a lot of a manager’s time used to disappear into low-value tasks like reading long email threads, preparing reports or troubleshooting manual workflows.
Today, Pipedrive’s AI can handle many of these manual, routine tasks, freeing up your CRM manager’s time for more strategic work.
For example:
AI email writer: Instead of reading through long email chains, your CRM manager gets instant AI summaries to act quickly without sorting through inbox noise.
AI search engine: AI recommends the right integrations based on your setup and customer needs, saving your CRM manager hours of research and trial-and-error.
AI-powered Sales Assistant: AI highlights trends in team performance and suggests improvements, giving your CRM manager quicker insights to close deals more efficiently.
With admin tasks handled automatically, your CRM manager has more time to focus on the bigger picture – and that starts with understanding your data.
Speed up data analysis
Manually sifting through vast amounts of customer data to look for patterns is a daunting task for any CRM manager.
Pipedrive’s intuitive dashboards make analyzing customer data easier.
CRM managers get access to a simple overview of your sales data, including information about deals, financial performance and rep activities. This overview allows them to easily spot bottlenecks and opportunities to optimize your sales process.
CRM managers can track key metrics from a single central location by adding custom reports to their dashboard, including the number of new deals and recurring revenue.
Other useful reports include:
Win rates
Sales velocity
Comparison to previous periods
Top performers
Number of lost deals
Pipedrive automates the creation of these reports and keeps them up to date in real-time. Fewer spreadsheets, fewer missed opportunities.
Get organized with your free sales pipeline excel template
Easy scaling and maintenance
Traditional on-premise CRM tools require maintenance, updates and on-site access.
Pipedrive’s award-winning software functions in the cloud, removing that burden and giving CRM managers instant access and automatic updates without developer involvement.
A cloud-based CRM also eliminates the need to troubleshoot outdated versions or inconsistent data.
As your company grows, your CRM manager can simply add integrations or upgrade your subscription to a plan that includes more features. This capability makes scaling far easier than building new functionality in-house and is often more cost-effective than purchasing additional tools.
An on-prem system limits access to the office. Meanwhile, Pipedrive’s Android and iPhone apps give your CRM manager flexibility to make updates and support reps from anywhere, anytime.
Fewer worries about data security
The person you hire to be your CRM manager will be the custodian of your entire customer database. That’s a lot of data – and significant responsibility day-to-day basis.
SOC 2 and SOC 3 compliance means Pipedrive undergoes regular independent security audits, giving your CRM manager confidence that the system meets high CRM security and privacy standards.
Pipedrive’s security dashboard helps your managers keep all your data safe from one central location.
Your CRM manager can:
Set user permission levels to control what each user can see or do inside your CRM system, reducing the risk of unauthorized actions.
Enforce two-factor authentication (2FA), ensuring that customer data remains protected even if a password is compromised.
Pipedrive will automatically back up your CRM data daily, allowing you to restore the information in case of accidental deletion, corruption, or system failure.
CRM Manager FAQs
Final thoughts
A great CRM manager brings clarity to your data, structure to your processes and momentum to your pipeline. Hiring one isn’t just about maintaining your system, but also unlocking more accurate forecasting, cleaner data and a smoother sales process.
Pipedrive gives them the tools to deliver those results faster, with less manual work holding them back. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to explore the features that support CRM managers consistently and at scale, as your company grows.
