Improve Customer Relationships with CRM Software

Customer Relationship Management is any tool, strategy, or process that helps businesses better organize and access customer data.

Technology

April 19, 2023

What is CRM Software?

CRM is an acronym that stands for customer relationship management. Customer relationship management is any tool, strategy, or process that helps businesses better organise and access customer data.

CRM (customer relationship management) software tracks and manages customer relationships. It records interactions between a business, its prospects, and its existing customers. CRM software products place all relevant customer data like contact information, history, and transaction summaries into a concise live record.

CRM software unites all customer and prospect data in a single tool, bringing added visibility into customer interactions. A CRM is the center of any successful sales organisation, the database in which all data, interactions, and notes are stored. Organisations use CRM systems to ensure that contact and interaction data can be easily located, sorted, and amended as necessary throughout the customer lifecycle. Contacts can be stored hierarchically under a single company or organisation, giving sales teams a holistic view of interactions with all relevant employees of a prospect or customer.

To qualify for inclusion in the G2 CRM category, a CRM solution must:

Provide a bounded set of sales-related functions
Consolidate customer history and transactions into a single interface
Track prospects and contacts throughout the sales pipeline
Facilitate communication at all phases of the customer lifecycle
Integrate functions into a unifying database and platform

What is Software as a Service (SaaS)

Many CRMs are SaaS products. SaaS is a program you access over the internet without having to install or maintain software. SaaS applications are also called

Web-based software
On-demand software
Hosted Software

Who uses CRM platforms?

Because most CRM platforms are in the cloud, they can grow and scale with your business. That means businesses of all sizes can — and should — use a CRM platform to manage their relationships with customers.

Below are the teams the will likely use CRM software often

Sales and Business Development Teams
Marketing Teams
Customer Service Teams

How a CRM Solution Works

CRM software collects all the data from your integrated platforms from multiple departments and keeps it organised. This data comes from Sales, Marketing and Customer Service, providing analytics and reporting.

What are the common features of CRM Software?

Account and contact management: One of the core features of a CRM is extensive account and contact management. Contact management features allow users to sort contacts by the accounts they are associated with. This allows users to have key contact information such as phone numbers and email addresses of various roles at any given company. This way if someone wants to contact a product marketing manager or even the CRO at a company they can quickly reference the contacts associated with the account.

Opportunity management: Another core feature of CRM software is opportunity management. This allows users to track a sales opportunity through its various stages, forecast the likelihood of closing an opportunity, take notes on customer pain points and needs, and track opportunity quotes. As an opportunity moves through the various stages, users can assign a percentage chance to the deal closing as well as mark if an account renewal is at risk of being lost. This will highlight a call to action for salespeople and will alert them that they might need to address any customer concerns to increase the likelihood that they will sign a deal. Additionally, within the opportunity section, salespeople can assign quotes for the deal based on how the deal is progressing. This helps salespeople give an accurate quote to a potential customer and forecast revenue for the fiscal year.

Lastly, it’s crucial for users to take diligent notes on customer needs as the deal progresses. For example, if a call was conducted and the potential customer indicated their pain points and what’s most important to them, users can record that within the opportunity page on the CRM. This allows salespeople to come back with their needs addressed and increases the likelihood of closing a deal.

Lead management: Lead management features are another core feature of a CRM that can help drive more revenue for businesses. When a lead filters into the company, whether that be from an event, an online form, or tracking online visitors, the CRM can automatically store a lead’s contact information as well as provide additional features to help pursue the lead. For example, CRMs generally provide lead scoring features that automatically determine the best leads to chase based on various factors including how that lead has already interacted with the business website. If a lead has visited certain pages or downloaded certain resources, it may be a good indicator of what product or solution they are looking for.

Additionally, CRMs can filter in important demographics and make it easy to visualize lead information such as job titles, company size, company revenue, and more. This further makes it easier to filter out leads that businesses shouldn’t waste time pursuing.

Sales analytics dashboards: CRM software helps to display a variety of analytics for sales departments. These sales analytics display historical sales data that can help showcase which sales activities have led to winning deals. This can include customer segmentation, profitability analysis, team performance, and more.