What is CRM?

Modern buyers have high standards. They expect your business to recognize them across channels, remember every interaction, and deliver relevant marketing content and personalized buying experiences. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software makes that possible by gathering, organizing, and analyzing customer data, so your sales, marketing, and customer service teams can leverage it to meet (and exceed) their expectations.

What is CRM? How can it help you improve customer engagement, boost sales productivity, automate marketing, and drive overall revenue? And how do you find the right CRM solution for your business?

At its core, CRM is designed to foster stronger, more meaningful relationships between a company and its customers. They often include databases of customer information, communication channels such as email and social media, and analytical tools to gain insights into customer behaviors, needs, and wants. 

The primary goal of CRM is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty by tailoring interactions and services to individuals. Centralizing customer data using CRM allows organizations to provide personalized and timely responses to customers. Additionally, CRM software for small businesses allows companies to optimize marketing efforts and streamline sales processes. Overall, CRM helps companies build lasting relationships, increase revenue, and remain competitive.

Types of CRM data might include (but are not limited to): 

• Contact information

• Demographic details

• Notes on conversations and digital interactions

• Past purchase history 

• Customer/deal status

• Average purchase amount

• Customer lifetime value

Without CRM software, all this information remains siloed. In small businesses, customer information is often scattered across Excel spreadsheets, email inboxes, or even notebooks. In larger enterprises, it is confined to department-specific software. This disjointed approach leads to disconnected and often outdated data, resulting in a fragmented customer experience and frustrating employee workflow. With CRM, whether customer information is collected via website or social media channels, by sales reps, marketing campaigns, or customer service teams, it all converges into one platform. This makes the data far more actionable and streamlines customer engagement processes. Moreover, through the integration of CRM with generative AI and machine learning solutions businesses can better automate customer engagement and gain deeper insights.

A new-age CRM helps automate customer engagement and delivers insights by including generative AI, and machine learning solutions. An AI-powered CRM enables businesses to analyze large amounts of customer data providing comprehensive customer insights. This knowledge helps businesses identify trends, forecast sales or tailor marketing campaigns more effectively. 

Generative AI also streamlines processes by automating numerous repetitive tasks that are considered tedious or time-consuming, allowing teams to focus on more strategic initiatives. Tasks like data entry, lead qualification, email responses, and customer segmentation can be efficiently handled by AI algorithms, significantly reducing manual effort and human error. Through this automation, AI enables CRM systems to deliver faster, more accurate responses, enhance personalization, and ultimately, improve the overall customer experience.

Why are CRMs important for your business?

Customer management relationship systems are indispensable tools for businesses across various industries for several reasons. First and foremost, CRM helps organizations store and centralize valuable customer data such as contact information, purchase history, preferences, and communication history. This helps companies gain a deeper understanding of their customer base, enabling them to tailor their products, services, and marketing campaigns to their audience, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and driving repeat business.

Centralized Customer Data

A CRM system centralizes customer data such as contact details, past interactions, and purchase history, allowing various teams like sales, marketing, and customer service to access and update information in real-time. This is especially important in businesses where different departments are spread out across different locations, or where they interact with clients at different stages. This integration fosters collaboration ensuring everyone is on the same page. 

Saving Money

CRM systems are cost-saving tools for businesses. By streamlining operations and automating tasks, they reduce labor costs and errors. They also improve marketing efficiency by enabling targeted campaigns that reduce spending on less effective marketing efforts. Due to centralized customer data, CRMs shorten problem resolution time, lowering costs associated with customer support. Additionally, they provide valuable insights that allow businesses to allocate resources wisely and tailor offerings to their customers, minimizing unnecessary expenses.

Improving Bottom Line

By streamlining processes and providing a unified view of customer interactions, a CRM system can enhance operational efficiency. For instance, sales teams can prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert, marketing campaigns can be targeted more precisely, and customer service can be more responsive to inquiries and issues. Ultimately, these improvements lead to cost savings and increased revenue generation, positively impacting the bottom line.

Increasing Customer Lifetime Value

A CRM system enables businesses to better understand their customer's preferences, behaviors and needs through detailed data analysis. Armed with this insight, companies can personalize their interactions with customers, anticipate their requirements, and offer tailored solutions or promotions. By nurturing stronger relationships and providing exceptional experiences, businesses can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, the lifetime value of each customer.

Preparing for the future

By collecting and analyzing customer data, CRMs reveal patterns that can be indicative of future market trends. These insights help companies make proactive decisions, anticipate customer demands, and adapt their strategies. CRMs track historical information and customer data that can be used to generate predictive analytics that aid in inventory forecasting and management as well as product development. This allows CRMs to be prepared for the future by responding quickly to emerging trends and opportunities.

What is CRM software used for?

The earliest customer relationship management software was used for basic contact management solutions. These emerged in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and replaced the Rolodex as a new way to store customer contact information. By the early 2000s, CRM had become a popular sales enablement tool, thanks to new functionality for lead generation and nurturing. 

In the age of cloud computing, CRM software has become an essential tool for all customer-facing teams, because it enables:

Automated data entry and management

Modern businesses use a wide variety of applications to communicate with customers, including cloud-based phone systems and contact center solutions, multi-channel marketing automation platforms, invoicing and billing software, and IT help desk systems. CRM can be integrated with these solutions using APIs, and your CRM system becomes the central repository of all customer information. 

When team members capture data or add details to one business system, it is automatically updated in your CRM in real-time. Likewise, these applications can pull customer data from your CRM, so whichever system an employee is using, they’re getting (and adding) the most up-to-date information. 

Sales funnel and lead management

Top CRM software is designed to guide sales teams through every stage of the sales cycle, from scoring and qualifying leads, all the way to closing deals. With one glance at a customized dashboard, salespeople can see which leads are in their pipeline, the status of each prospect, and what needs to be done to convert them into customers.

AI-enhanced CRM solutions can also:

• Determine whether leads are hot or cold

• Score, prioritize, and assign leads

• Provide sales reps with detailed scripts and intelligent insights for how to connect with hard-to-reach prospects

• Send reminders about the upcoming meeting

• Send notifications when customers perform a significant activity (like visiting your pricing page or reading a case study

• Remind reps to follow up when new opportunities arise to cross-sell or upsell existing clients

Along the way, CRM automates much of the administrative work and data entry so your reps can focus on connecting with customers and closing deals. 

Marketing automation

The more customer information your marketing team has, the more relevant messages they can send. Using CRM (or better yet, a marketing automation platform that has been integrated with CRM), marketers know who customers are, where they are, what they’ve bought, and other pertinent information that can be used to target customers with personalized content and offers.

Marketing teams can use integrated CRM systems to: 

• Set up chatbots and web forms to connect with website visitors and convert them into leads

• Track a visitor's activity through the website

• Segment customers into lists based on their behavior

• Create, schedule, and send personalized nurture emails to be delivered at the right time, based on where prospects are in the customer journey

• Get reports on marketing analytics for a holistic understanding of the audience

Marketing analysis and sales forecasting

CRM is just as useful for sales and marketing leaders as it is for their teams, thanks to advanced data analysis and reporting functionality. They can use CRM tools to:

• Track sales and marketing activities (such as phone calls made and emails clicked through)

• Track the effectiveness of individual sellers or campaigns

• Evaluate the overall performance of their teams

• View a visual representation of the sales pipeline to identify bottlenecks and challenges that stand in the way of teams making quota

• Run reports forecasting sales and revenue

• Gain AI insights into potential sales process improvements

Customer service and support

Customer support and service teams also need (and have) important information about your customers. When customers reach out with questions or problems, support teams can find all the relevant information they need in one place—from the customer’s buying history to the status of orders, to previous conversations they’ve had with the service team.

If CRM is integrated with your business phone system or contact center software, agents don’t even have to go looking for this information. It appears on their computer screen the moment they take the call or open the live chat. And any information they collect goes right back into CRM for future reference.

What doesn’t a CRM do? 

While CRMs offer a multitude of benefits, it’s important to understand their limitations. First, CRMs cannot magically fix any underlying issues within a business such as insufficient customer service. Implementing one of these systems does not automatically ensure exceptional customer experiences; rather, it provides the tools and structure necessary to foster these relationships. If a business lacks a customer-centric approach or effective customer service practices, a CRM alone will not compensate for these shortcomings. For a CRM implementation to succeed, a company must invest in training and foster a commitment to providing excellent customer experiences.

It is also crucial to understand that CRMs are not a one-size-fits-all solution to a company’s customer service needs. They are highly customizable to the specific needs of a business, but they require careful configuration and management. In addition, CRMs may not integrate seamlessly with a company’s existing software and systems, which creates challenges when it comes to data synchronization and workflow efficiency. CRMs offer flexibility, but businesses must be committed to personalizing their systems to align with their needs.

Lastly, CRMs are not a substitute for genuine human interaction. While they can automate and streamline aspects of customer engagement efforts, they cannot replace the authenticity and empathy associated with human interaction. Building strong, meaningful customer relationships tends to require more complex interactions than a CRM can offer. These tools should be used to enhance customer communications, not replace them.

Benefits of CRM software

1. Accelerated Conversions

Customer relationship management software scores and prioritizes potential customers, so salespeople are only assigned qualified leads. It also enables your marketing team to deliver relevant messages at each touchpoint throughout the customer journey, so prospects are primed to buy before salespeople ever reach out. All this accelerates the sales process and conversions. In fact, CRM can increase lead conversion rates by 300 percent and boost purchase value by 40 percent, according to a Forrester study (as reported in Entrepreneur).

2. Reduced data entry

Managing customer relationships requires managing customer data, but data entry can be time-consuming, error-prone, and often overlooked by busy teams. With a well-integrated CRM solution, you can automate much of the data entry. For instance, contact information from email marketing campaigns and digital forms gets automatically ported into CRM. Meanwhile, phone calls that come into your contact center are automatically logged in CRM, along with any notes that service reps make during customer interactions. 

3. Enhanced collaboration 

CRM helps your sales and marketing teams get on the same page, or rather, the same platform. As the central hub for all customer data, it enables different teams to share customer information, plan their targeting strategy, and deliver seamless customer experiences that grow your business. 

4. Personalized customer experiences

From lead to prospect to buyer, the entire customer journey is captured in your CRM. This enables sales, marketing, and customer support teams to deliver seamless, personalized, omnichannel customer experiences. With one look at the CRM, agents know who they’re talking to, what those customers have bought, what they like, and what they need—whether that’s personalized marketing messaging or context-driven customer service. As a result, nearly half (47%) of salespeople say CRM solutions improve both their customer satisfaction and customer retention, according to Zippia. 

5. Marketing metrics / sales KPIs

CRM doesn’t just streamline sales and marketing efforts; it tracks them and evaluates their effectiveness. It can analyze the impact of your marketing campaigns and provide high-level, detailed reports for smart decision-making. It can also track sales KPIs to help you identify the rainmakers on your sales force, and which reps need additional training and resources. 

6. Increased revenue

CRM enables your sales and marketing teams to target the right leads at the right time. It also provides a well-rounded view of your existing customers, enabling you to cross-sell and up-sell with higher success rates. As a result, 89% of businesses grow their revenue after implementing CRM, according to a global Freshsales/Forrester study.

7. Measurable ROI

The results are in: CRM is a worthy investment. According to G2’s Grid Report for CRM (Spring 2023), the average ROI period for a CRM is about 13 months, which means that the CRM pays for itself within a year. 

Who can use CRM?

No two businesses are the same, but they all have one thing in common: If they don’t maintain a good relationship with their customers, they won’t be in business long. That makes CRM a valuable tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Here's how sales, marketing, and service teams in different types of companies can benefit from using a CRM.

Based on company size

1. Startups

If you’re running a startup, you have very clear expectations from business software—including zero tolerance for complexity and no time for a steep learning curve. That’s why CRMs for startups must be easy-to-use with an intuitive interface and features designed to help the business scale quickly.

2. Small businesses

If your business is small, you probably don’t plan for it to remain small forever. You can’t afford all the bells and whistles that come with an enterprise-grade CRM platform, but that shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying CRM benefits.

3. Enterprises

Businesses are always looking to close deals, and if you’re a sales leader for an enterprise, you want to close big. This requires ever-expanding sales teams, a wider casting net, and a steady stream of qualified leads in the pipeline. It also makes a CRM for enterprise a must-have software to bring order, clarity, and a sense of purpose to your sales process.

Based on the business category

1. B2B

In b2b saas crm, success depends on getting buyers to know you, like you, and trust you—and then convince their counterparts in other departments and companies to know, like, and trust you too. CRM is an invaluable tool for B2B sellers focused on demonstrating thought leadership via marketing, earning trust via relationship-building, and then leveraging those relationships for upsells, cross-sells, and referrals.

2. B2C

In a B2C landscape, customer satisfaction and loyalty is everything. A good CRM platform should enable your organization to rise above their competition by helping to streamline customer interactions, personalize customer experiences, and scale marketing automation. 

Based on industry

1. SaaS

In a Saas business, you’re reaching out to resellers, partners, and businesses of all sizes every day. Whether you’re acquiring leads, tracking sign-ups, managing subscriptions, or setting up demos for your contacts, a SaaS CRM can help you streamline all this data in one place.

2. Real estate

Real estate buyers have unique requirements, and your team must understand customer needs and be in sync with each other. Siloed data leads to a broken customer experience and makes it hard to make smart, revenue-boosting decisions. Real-estate CRM gives you a visual representation of your entire contact lifecycle and identifies your highest-quality leads.

3. Hospitality

In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, hotels must stay top of mind for customers. A good hotel CRM helps you understand them at a glance and gives you the tools you need to deliver personalized offers, engaging content, and rewarding loyalty programs, so they keep coming back again and again.

4. Insurance

In the age of insurance aggregator marketplaces, it’s a challenging time to be an insurance salesperson. The best insurance CRM platforms help you take a customer-first approach and engage buyers across channels—all from a single platform. CRM can also help you scale communication so you have the time to find and nurture new leads while still delivering the hands-on service that sets you apart from the aggregators.

5. Retail

Brick-and-mortar isn’t over, but to thrive in the era of digital shopping, modern retailers must remain focused on customer relationships. Retail CRM can help you better understand your customers, personalize their shopping experience, and engage them via their preferred channels—all from one central data hub that unites sales, marketing, and customer support.

6. Manufacturing

Between managing a complex supply chain and complex sales cycles, managing customer relationships can be challenging for manufacturers. Disparate software and data silos make things even harder. But manufacturing CRM breaks down those silos, putting all your important data in one place, so you can make smart decisions and deliver a best-in-class customer experience.

7. Finance

Personalization is the key to great customer experiences for financial institutions. CRM for finance ensures that all your customer-facing teams can access important data, without bouncing around between multiple tools. This way, you can deliver the customized services and personalized messaging your customers want, via their favorite channels.

8. Logistics

Digital transformation, new competitors and business models, and changing customer expectations have forever changed the logistics industry—and raised the stakes for legacy businesses. Logistics CRM helps you keep customers where they want to be: front and center. It can help you track progress with prospects, measure how your business is performing, track shipment status, and improve your overall customer experience, so they remain loyal customers.

CRM examples in action

Faster business expansion

CRM is mission-critical when your customers rely on you for contact information. That was the case for Travel Counsellors. As the UK’s largest technology platform for travel entrepreneurs, the agency provides more than 1,900 independent business owners with telephony, email-based sales solutions, and service operations. However, its legacy solutions couldn’t scale with the company, and the organization didn’t have a standardized central knowledge base of customers that support agents could access, illustrating the need for robust CRM examples.

By implementing Freshsales CRM and the Freshdesk customer service platform, Travel Counsellors:

• Automated workflows for sending emails and moving contacts and accounts along to different deal stages

• Simplified onboarding with an intuitive, user-friendly UI that let new franchisees access all required information from a single window 

• Boosted sales revenue by digitizing customer onboarding, which enabled them to add 33% more new customers

Improved collaboration and sales

When your data is disconnected, so are your teams. That was the problem for the sales team at TKF Telecom France, a global supplier of fiber optic cables. They struggled to collaborate with each other and with reseller partners because different teams housed customer information in different sales applications. Not only did they waste precious time with constant app-switching, but they couldn’t share insights that would help boost sales. 

After deploying Freshsales CRM, TKF Telecom France was able to:

• Unify customer data, enabling stakeholders to visualize customer engagement with the brand

• Boost productivity by eliminating app-switching and providing a single source of data 

• Receive AI insights from Freddy, Freshsales' AI-powered assistant, about how to improve the sales pipeline and sales team productivity

“As soon as we were given a demo of Freshsales, we knew it would resolve some of our most pressing sales challenges, to begin with,” says Jean-Philippe Thiery, Managing Director of TKF Telecom France. “In fact, after a short set-up period and minimal training, we were able to hit the ground running from Day 1.”

Modernized communications

An outdated CRM isn’t much better than no CRM. For Synergy Enterprise Solutions—an Australia and New Zealand-based company that sells customer experience, omnichannel engagement, and collaboration solutions—a lackluster CRM solution was slowing down the team’s productivity and the business’s growth. Leadership knew that scaling sales would require a modern CRM that provided a single view of multiple communication channels.

By transitioning to Freshsales, Synergy gained the ability to:

• View multichannel communications in a single window, and have more contextual conversations that boost engagement and lifetime value (LTV) scores

• Prospect more efficiently, thanks to lead scoring functionality that prioritizes the most promising prospects, resulting in 40% more revenue in six months 

Work on the go, with mobile CRM that account executives can use to effortlessly add deal information, configure workflows, and personalize sequences while on the move.

When is the right time to adopt a CRM system?

Wondering if you’re ready for CRM? The following business needs are sure signs it’s time to start shopping:

• Scaling Business Growth: As your business expands, managing customer information with spreadsheets or disparate systems becomes inefficient. A CRM ensures your growing client base is effectively managed.

• Increasing Customer Inquiries: If you're receiving more inquiries than before and finding it challenging to track them all, a CRM can help manage these leads effectively, ensuring no one slips through the cracks.

• Need for Improved Customer Service: If customer issues or complaints are getting overlooked, you need a more systematic approach to customer service. A CRM ensures that all customer touchpoints are recorded and addressed.

• Lack of Insight into Sales Performance: If you're unsure about where leads are coming from or the status of various deals, a CRM can provide clarity by tracking each journey from lead to close.

• Collaboration Challenges: When sales, marketing, and customer support teams work in silos, crucial information might not be shared efficiently. A CRM centralizes data, fostering better collaboration.

• Inefficient Marketing Efforts: If you're unable to segment your audience for targeted marketing campaigns or can't measure campaign ROI effectively, a CRM can streamline these processes.

• Data Management Issues: If you're struggling with data duplication, loss, or inaccuracy, it's time to consider more robust data management tools like CRM.

• Demand for Mobile Access: As businesses become more mobile, having access to customer data on the go is crucial. Modern CRM systems offer mobile solutions.

• Desire to Automate Repetitive Tasks: If a significant amount of time is spent on manual tasks like data entry or sending routine follow-up emails, CRM can automate these business processes, freeing up time for more to strategic activities.

Inconsistent Customer Experience: When customers receive different responses or treatment depending on whom they speak to, a CRM can help standardize and improve their overall experience.

Choosing the right CRM software for your business

There are many good customer relationship management solutions available to modern businesses, but they're not all created equal. Choosing the best CRM solution for your business depends on a variety of factors, including your industry and your company size. However, there are five key criteria for all CRM shoppers to consider

Simplicity

CRM should save your team time and make their lives easier. If it’s complicated to learn and time-consuming to use, they probably won’t do either. An intuitive user experience, clean interface, and minimal deployment time are important indicators of a simple CRM solution. Also look for CRM solutions that can be right-sized to meet your unique business needs—meaning your dashboard isn’t clogged up with features and functionality your team might never use

Relevance

The ideal CRM for your business meets your unique business needs and solves your specific use case(s). Before starting a CRM hunt, keep your use case(s) ready and clearly defined, and look for a vendor that has deep experience in your CRM industry.

Scalability

Change is the only constant in business. You might be poised for growth, or you might suddenly need to cut back. Depending on your industry, the size of your sales and support teams might vary by season. Either way, you want a CRM system that can meet your needs now and in the future.

Price

Most cloud-based CRM solutions offer pay-as-you-go subscription models, but watch out for hidden costs in terms of maintenance, implementation, and customer support. Again, look for a right-sized solution that doesn’t require you to pay for bells and whistles you don’t need. If there’s a free CRM version, give it a spin. Then add additional features if and when you need them.

Artificial intelligence

CRM systems have advanced far beyond contact management solutions. A Modern CRM features such as workflow automation and sales force automation tools, and advanced data reporting capabilities, rely on increasingly AI technology. If these features are important to you (or might be in the future), look for a vendor that is investing in AI for CRM.

Essential features of a CRM

Unified view of contacts

On a single screen, you get a 360-degree overview of every lead, prospect, and customer, including customer contact info, a chronological timeline of customer interactions, website activities such as pages visited and marketing material downloaded, and other contextual information that would enable personalized conversations to drive closure. A good CRM software also helps you prioritize leads by ranking contacts based on their engagement with your business.

Pipeline management

Your CRM tool should give you instant clarity on the status of your sales funnel(s). It should provide a visual overview of all deals, grouped under different stages and arranged like a pipeline. With one look at this screen, you know where to start for the day. AI-powered CRMs even suggest the next best action to take. This helps you forecast sales, identify bottlenecks, and make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts. Deal pipeline management is made simple.

Automated data entry

A good CRM minimizes the mundane task of data entry. It automatically captures prospect information from inbound communications, enriches each contact and business profile with social media information, and auto-assigns incoming prospects to the right salespeople based on geography and/or expertise to reduce lead response time.

Email management

Switching between email and CRM is a time sink. A good CRM can be integrated with your email client, so you spend less time navigating between applications and have more time to spend engaging customers. Email integrates should also enable you to create and save email templates for common communications, send bulk emails to your contacts, schedule emails to reach prospects at the right time, and track open rates and click-throughs.

Sales automation

Sales automation is a key component of modern CRM solutions, which can initiate workflows based on trigger actions. With the right automation features, your CRM can qualify and assign leads, change the status of deals, send welcome emails or renewal reminders, and create appointments and reminders. Some CRM solutions (including Freshsales) offer a set of pre-designed workflow templates you can use to automate all your daily tasks. 

Marketing automation

Some CRMs come with marketing automation capabilities, helping you achieve the all-important sales/marketing alignment. These CRMs consolidate both teams’ data, so the sales team knows how marketing is nurturing leads and which prospects are primed to buy. Meanwhile, the marketing team knows how effective their nurturing campaigns actually are, and they can pass leads along to sales inside the CRM. Plus, leaders receive reports and insights that help them make smarter decisions. 

Insightful analytics and reports

If you can’t measure your performance, you can’t improve it. With all the data stored in a CRM, you should be able to run reports and quickly gain insights into sales/marketing targets and success rates, sales activities, individual and team performance, marketing effectiveness, and much more. The best CRM software enables you to whip up a standard report using a template or customize reports and take a dive deep into your unique use cases.

Omnichannel engagement 

CRM should enable your teams to engage with leads, prospects, and customers across channels, using the same tool. Powerful CRM tools should enable you to communicate via (and access data from): phone calls, email, SMS, live chat, and every third-party communication/collaboration app that’s important to your customers and your team.

Mobile CRM

The best CRMs offer well-designed mobile apps. Whether your team members are working from home, in business meetings, at trade shows, in-flight, or on the road, mobile CRM lets them view prospect information, manage and track deals via a visual sales pipeline, read and send emails, check in at meetings, add voice notes, create tasks and appointments, and navigate their way to a meeting location. And whatever they do in the mobile app seamlessly syncs with the desktop version, so they’re always in the loop and up-to-date.

Customer relationship management integrations

CRM is a valuable tool on its own, but integrating it with other key business systems and communication channels unlocks new opportunities to increase operational efficiency, customer engagement, and business revenue.

Key integrations include:

Helpdesk

During the buying process, salespeople get full context into the requirements and challenges of potential customers. But after the purchase is complete, customers typically only interact with support agents, and sales teams have no visibility into the customer experience.

Integrating your CRM with your helpdesk software brings both teams into one platform. The sales team stays in the loop about customer issues, which prepares them for future cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Similarly, the customer support team gains insights into customer needs and history, which can help streamline implementation and customer service.

Marketing automation

Sales and marketing teams play different roles in the customer journey, but they have similar goals: to improve customer experiences and drive revenue. But more often than not, these complimentary teams are at odds, due to a lack of visibility into common information, poor lead transition, and inaccurate revenue attribution to sales and marketing efforts. 

Getting them on the same page (or platform) solves all these problems. To do so, you can either integrate CRM with marketing automation tools or invest in an all-in-one CRM solution with marketing automation capabilities.

Document management

From raising invoices, to shuttling between sales contracts, to sealing NDAs, documentation is a big part of a salespeople’s job. In the ancient world of OnPrem CRMs, these sales documents would be all over the place.

Modern cloud CRMs with built-in CPQ allow you to generate error-free documents in a few clicks. You can also send and track the progress of documents from within the CRM, turning it into a centralized database for all customer-related documents, which simplifies retrieval and collaboration.

E-Signature

E-signature accelerates the sales process, enabling new customers to sign contacts, NDAs, and other legal documents from anywhere. 

Integrating your e-signature tool with CRM streamlines the process even further. Salespeople simply select the appropriate documents, add recipients, and send them off to be signed—without ever leaving CRM. These steps can even be automated as part of the new customer onboarding process, so salespeople don’t have to bother collecting signatures at all.

Calling software

Salespeople spend a lot of time on the phone, gathering important information about prospects and customers. All that information belongs in CRM, where it can be put to good use. A CRM with a built-in phone system, or that’s integrated with telephony software, enables you to automatically log all calls and phone recordings in your CRM, where they’re organized by contact for future reference. Some solutions even prompt salespeople to add notes as soon as they hang up, while the information is still fresh in their minds.

Live chat

Sophisticated CRMs either offer built-in chatbots or native integrations with popular chat services available. Either way, this opens up new communication channels you can leverage to deliver intuitive and personalized messages to sales leads at the right time, which helps to increase website conversions and automate support.

Afterwards, important details from these conversations get logged in CRM, along with a complete transcript of customer interactions for future reference.

How to implement a CRM platform

Effective utilization of customer relationship management (CRM) software hinges on robust data management practices and a well-defined CRM implementation strategy. Sales and marketing teams rely on a strong CRM strategy to harness the full potential of data and establish meaningful connections between various data points. While specific CRM strategies may differ across businesses, implementing CRM effectively entails adhering to several best practices, such as:

Define your use cases

Does your business involve extensive cold calling, or are most of your leads inbound? How many emails do you send on an average every day? Does your business depend on field sales or inside sales, or both? How many marketing campaigns do you run every month? What are your most popular communication channels? Answering these questions is the first step toward defining your use cases.

Use a CRM that fits your use cases

When you know your use cases, you know what your business needs from a CRM. For example, if your business thrives on email marketing campaigns, your CRM software should let you track email opens and click-through rates in real-time, while also helping you send bulk emails. If your business depends on international calling, your CRM should have a built-in (or integrated) phone system that lets you buy numbers from across the globe.

Have SMART expectations for your CRM software

Remember to have SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) expectations from the CRM software. This type of proactive thinking can mean the difference between increasing your deals (which is vague and not a useful metric) and increasing the number of closed deals by 100% in 30 days (which is specific and easy to track).

Engage your sales team in CRM Implementation

CRM software can’t be imposed on your teams; they need to use it and experience the benefits before they’ll feel happy about it. If the CRM has a free trial, get your teams to sign up right away and solicit their feedback. This is a great way to find out everything about the CRM, including the kind of support you’ll get. Getting their input also ensures they’ll be more invested in using the software if/when you make a purchasing decision.

Cloud vs. on-premise

While considering a CRM software for your business, you’ll be confronted with numerous choices in the market today. But, before you decide, a critical factor in your decision depends on how you want to deploy and access the CRM software— cloud vs. on-premise. Though both have their advantages in meeting specific business needs, the preference for cloud CRM has risen owing to the need to access CRM data anywhere. Another big decision to make when shopping for CRM is whether to opt for a cloud-based or on-prem solution. 

Cloud CRM

Cloud CRM has rapidly become the most popular choice, due to its mobility, scalability, and lower price point. With cloud-based solutions, data is hosted and managed by the vendor, and you can access it via any internet-connected device. Cloud CRM offers an easy pay-as-you-go model and requires no hardware installation or maintenance costs.

On-Premise CRM

CRM software and data are hosted locally on your business server and computers, giving you complete control of the system. But you’re also on the hook for all the costs, including server and software installations, and recurring monthly costs for licenses. It’s harder to scale and must be manually updated anytime new features are rolled out. Many CRM vendors don’t even offer this option.

Ready for your first CRM?

Getting started with CRM doesn’t have to be costly or time-consuming. Freshsales (formerly Freshworks CRM) is a cloud-based CRM that’s feature-rich, AI-enhanced, and free to try. Whether you’re running a small business or leading multiple teams of enterprise sellers and marketers, Freshsales has the functionality you need to scale quickly, automate workflows, and increase revenue with intelligent recommendations and data analysis.