What is CRM?
CRM, or customer relationship management, refers to strategies that businesses use to manage customer interactions and data. With a CRM system like Pipedrive, you can organize, manage, track and improve the customer experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Our CRM platform helps you automate communications, simplify processes and build stronger customer relationships.
What is CRM software?
CRM software is a tool that enables you to manage customer data and nurture customer relationships.
Each CRM platform is different, but here are some practical CRM features to look for:
Lead management: Capture lead data from various sources, assign lead quality scores and match new leads with the right sales rep.
Pipeline management: Map your sales pipeline with a CRM to better understand how customers move through the buying journey and to encourage conversion.
Workflow and marketing automation: Automate repetitive tasks like prospecting, lead qualification and customer communications to simplify your workflow and provide potential customers with a personalized experience.
Reporting and forecasting: Use dashboards, CRM analysis and reporting tools to identify customer trends and assess sales performance.
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What are the benefits of using a CRM?
A CRM system helps you manage all customer data in one database, improve sales management and track sales.
Here’s how those benefits work on a daily basis:
Manage CRM data in one database: A central hub for contact management makes it quicker and easier for salespeople to access valuable customer information.
Improve sales management: The data stored in a CRM tells you who your customers are, how they behave and what they want. This information helps you improve sales decisions and marketing efforts.
Track sales and financial performance: A CRM platform provides a rundown of your sales, revenue and financial performance. This helps you see how well you’re doing and pinpoint areas of the sales process that need improvement.
How users benefit from Pipedrive’s CRM
Increase deals in your pipeline by 93%
Reduce average deal closing time by 46%
Increase average deal value by 21%
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Who benefits from using a CRM platform?
CRM software is useful across a range of industries, from SaaS and real estate to manufacturing and marketing. A CRM platform will benefit any large or small business that wants to improve customer satisfaction, increase efficiency and boost sales.
Within an organization, teams like sales, marketing, customer support, finance and operations can profit from using a CRM to perform the following activities:
- 1. Optimize the sales funnel to close more deals
Marketing attracts leads and passes them to sales, but keeping track of opportunities and follow-up activities is only possible with a robust, organized system.
A good CRM platform helps you track all sales activities before and after conversion.
Score every lead and follow them in real time along the sales pipeline to recognize opportunities for improvement, spot winning patterns and refine your sales funnel.
- 2. Generate higher-value leads to increase profits
The more audience data you collect, the easier it is to define your ideal customers.
Visual pipelines, reports and dashboards let marketers at all levels know who to target for the best sales outcomes. By tailoring your marketing content, you can engage with the right buyers: those most likely to become loyal followers.
- 3. Build solid relationships to boost customer loyalty
Addressing your target audience's challenges helps you build strong, profitable relationships.
A CRM will help you address specific pain points, build trust and keep the same customers coming back.
Use your CRM to get to know leads, prospects and customers via:
Previous conversations
Buying journeys
Purchase histories
Website activity
Marketing campaign responses
- 4. Streamline cross-team collaboration to achieve bigger goals
Sales and marketing share many common goals. The better aligned they are, the better your business will perform.
According to Pipedrive’s State of Sales and Marketing 2021/2022 report, companies with well-integrated sales and marketing departments were twice as likely as companies with poor revenue team integration to exceed their annual revenue targets.
A CRM is a central knowledge hub for sales, marketing and other customer-focused functions. It enables teams to share valuable insights and make more informed decisions at all stages of the customer lifecycle.
- 5. Eliminate busywork to grow productivity
Salespeople and marketers often spend valuable hours on mundane admin tasks. A good CRM can process some or all of this repetitive work with automations, letting your team members spend time nurturing leads and serving customers.
Pipedrive lets you automate almost any step of your sales process and even some marketing tasks.
Trigger personalized emails to go out whenever a new deal enters the pipeline
Schedule follow-up tasks when deals reach certain stages
Score leads so reps know who to contact for the best outcomes
Research shows that automation directly improves business and individual performance. Our State of Sales and Marketing 2021/2022 report revealed that people who automate tasks are 16% more likely to hit their targets.
How Pipedrive’s CRM helped Tiffany Largie grow her business to $2.5 million
Tiffany Largie, a successful entrepreneur, business speaker and consultant, found her sales team leaving money on the table as they struggled to keep up with data management.
Pipedrive’s simple CRM solution helped her team instantly begin tracking customer data in real time. The CRM software enabled sales reps to manage multiple revenue streams simultaneously, automating the sales process to help them close deals faster.
“We were managing between 150–300 outreaches a day. With Pipedrive, we could handle that data in real time in a way that didn’t require us to perform a lot of data entry.”
The advantages of using a cloud-based vs. an on-premise CRM platform
Unlike an on-site CRM (which lives on your company’s server), a cloud-based CRM is accessible online. Here are a few benefits of using an online CRM vs. an on-site solution:
| Cloud-based CRM | On-premise CRM |
Work from anywhere: All you need are your login details and a solid internet connection | Access is limited to set devices and locations |
Access to real-time data means all employees work from the most up-to-date files | Manual updates can lead to employees working from out-of-date files |
Quick and easy installation: The software and all its features are online and ready to use immediately | A complex structure needs expertise and time to install locally |
Vendor support and maintenance make for a cost-effective solution | Costs add up with the internal staff required to provide support and maintenance |
Easy to scale with added resources and various pricing plans as your business grows | Changes to the size or capacity of the platform require new purchases or additional software and take time to install |
How to manage and improve customer relationships with CRM
A CRM platform can help you maintain better relationships with your customers by enabling you to:
Visualize the customer journey: A CRM system tells you where new customers came into contact with your brand. For example, via your social media page, website or sales email.
These touchpoints give you a clear picture of how customers move through the buying journey and what you can do to make it easier for them and encourage them to buy.
Identify trends in customer behavior: With a CRM, you can easily spot patterns in customer behavior. You’ll better understand buyer behavior and how to meet their needs.
Create a personalized customer experience: A CRM allows you to send personalized communications to customers. As a result, they enjoy their experience with your business and are more likely to keep moving along the sales cycle to make a purchase.
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CRM FAQs
- What does CRM stand for?
CRM is an acronym for customer relationship management. It describes the process of managing customer data and improving customer interactions to increase sales.
- What is a CRM system?
A CRM system is a database that stores all your customer information, including contact information like phone numbers and email addresses. The specific features of a CRM system vary depending on the platform you use. Take a look at Pipedrive’s CRM features to find out more.
- What are CRM tools?
Customer relationship management tools are platforms that help businesses manage customer data. “CRM tools” refers to CRM systems like Pipedrive and other platforms that help you manage customer relationships and integrate with your primary CRM system. For example, chatbot platforms like Intercom can help you provide customer support and improve customer engagement.
- What does a CRM do?
A CRM manages customer data, automates customer communication tasks (like email marketing or reminders to make customer phone calls), supports lead generation, improves lead nurturing and provides information so you can make improvements.
- How to use CRM software in each department
While customer relationship management software is popular with sales teams, all customer-facing teams can benefit from CRM tools.
For example, customer service teams can use CRM software to track and manage customer interactions, collaborate with other departments, resolve help desk issues or complaints and improve the overall customer experience.
CRM support software can also help your sales team manage leads, deal with potential customers and predict future sales.
- What are the three types of CRM?
There are three main types of CRM solutions – operational, analytical and collaborative.
An operational CRM platform focuses on streamlining business processes to improve the customer experience.
An analytical CRM platform has a variety of features that helps you study customer data to gain valuable information.
A collaborative CRM helps teams break down silos and makes working together easier, even for teams distributed across different locations.
If you’re not sure which type of CRM is right for you, use a well-rounded platform like Pipedrive. With our CRM, you can streamline your processes, analyze customer data and improve collaboration across your business. Find out more about our CRM or sign up for a free trial.
- What is a CRM in business?
In business, CRM helps organizations build customer relationships and streamline business processes. As a result, they can increase sales, improve customer service and increase profitability.
- What is a CRM in sales?
In sales, a CRM manages lead and customer touchpoints and interactions throughout the buying process. It tracks prospect communication, supports sales and marketing teams with customer outreach and sends automatic reminders to follow up with leads. It also tracks sales data, informing your sales activities to help you get better results.
- What is a CRM strategy?
CRM strategies are company-wide plans to improve relationships with existing and potential customers.
Businesses use a CRM platform to create a CRM strategy. They follow CRM best practices such as reviewing customer data, analyzing customer behavior and pinpointing the most crucial information. The strategy will help the business grow revenue, increase profits, reduce costs and provide more customer value.
- What is the future of CRM?
With the continual development of technology (particularly artificial intelligence, or AI), CRMs will continue to provide value to customer-first companies. CRM features and integrations will grow, allowing teams to empower their customer management processes with automation and AI-powered technology.