What is CRM (Customer Relationship Management)?

CRM is a system that helps businesses manage all interactions with customers and prospects to improve relationships, streamline processes, and drive growth.

Let's define CRM

CRM stands for customer relationship management, a system for managing all your company's interactions with current and potential customers. The goal is simple: improving relationships to grow your business. CRM technology helps companies stay connected with customers, streamlining processes, and increasing profitability.

When people talk about CRM, they're usually referring to a CRM system: software that helps track every interaction you have with a prospect or customer. This can include sales calls, customer service interactions, marketing emails, and more.

CRM tools can unify customer and company data from multiple sources and even use artificial intelligence (AI) to better manage relationships throughout the customer lifecycle, spanning departments like marketing, sales, e-commerce, and customer service interactions.

So why is CRM important, and who can benefit from it? Let's take a look.

Who is CRM for?

CRM software is used by companies of all sizes and industries. It's beneficial for large corporations that need to easily track customer activity in one place and share it across departments, small businesses that often need to do more with fewer resources, and startups that want to be agile and efficient. Regardless of your industry, or even if you're a nonprofit, if you communicate with customers—and your employees depend on that customer information—then a CRM system can help.

Customer relationship management software can benefit almost any department in your company, from sales to service, IT, marketing, and more. Whether you're starting out large or small, getting started is easy.

Why is a CRM system important for your business?

Running a business is becoming increasingly complex. The average organization uses nearly 900 different applications—but only 29% of these applications are integrated.

To stay ahead, your company needs to be customer-centric and supported by the right technology. However, obtaining up-to-date, reliable, and actionable information can be complex. How do you translate the various incoming data streams from sales, customer service, marketing, and social media into useful business insights?

With a CRM solution, of course. Here are some reasons why using a CRM database is important for your business.

A single source of truth

Customer relationship management software like Salesforce CRM can give you a clear, unified customer profile—a single, simple, secure, and customizable dashboard that displays a customer's purchase history, order status, unresolved customer service issues, and more. This information can be invaluable, especially since 82% of service professionals say customer expectations are higher than ever.

Whether a customer has previously contacted you via phone, chat, email, or social media, a single, trusted source of information ensures everyone in your company can deliver the expected level of service.

Having a single, accurate data source for your management system is also crucial so AI solutions can quickly uncover insights and take relevant actions based on your customer data. No matter where your data resides, you can easily integrate it into a single CRM, eliminating the need for expensive and difficult-to-manage data flows.

Cost Savings

Having a single source of accurate information doesn't just benefit customers: It also helps companies stay organized and focused on revenue-generating activities. Sales teams generate a lot of data when talking to prospects, meeting with customers, and gathering valuable information.

Keeping all of this information—call notes, customer contacts, sales leads—in one location that's easily accessible to your entire team helps prevent errors and increase productivity. Digital workers can help extend these management savings by automating data entry, minimizing operational costs, and reducing repetitive manual tasks like writing sales emails, generating reports, and following up with leads.

And if someone leaves a company, unless their contacts and records are stored in a CRM, that information—and the business—may go with them.

Using a CRM system means reducing administrative work and freeing up more time to focus on building personal relationships with your customers, which can ultimately increase sales.

Connecting all your teams

A CRM unites your teams by sharing information that makes everyone's work easier.

For example, marketers can use CRM tools to manage campaigns and lead generation. With a data-driven approach, CRM software provides visibility into every opportunity or lead, showing a clear path from inquiry to sale. The sales team can then present personalized offers on your website, while customer service already knows the customer's history if they contact you with questions.

Enhance your customer experience with AI

Some of the biggest benefits can be gained by combining CRM with the power of AI agents. This allows you to quickly gain customer insights to personalize every interaction. This can increase employee productivity, especially when using AI agents that can act automatically based on instructions and constraints you set.

Digital workforce: Take productivity to the next level by responding to service inquiries, scheduling follow-ups, or generating customized services. CRM reports: AI agents can help speed up labor-intensive tasks, such as composing sales emails, creating marketing messages, and writing or localizing product descriptions—all of which can free up teams to focus on more meaningful work.

AI-based CRM also allows employees to make more accurate predictions in forecasts such as quarterly sales targets, e-commerce sales, or the best time to send marketing emails.

What are the benefits of CRM?

There are many benefits to using CRM software—especially when your business combines CRM with AI and data you can trust. Here are some of them:

Connecting your business silos

The ability to easily share data across your teams is a huge benefit for both your customers and your business. CRM provides everyone in your company with simple, customizable user interfaces with real-time updates that they can use to serve customers. So, when a customer calls with a question, a service representative can see their entire history, past marketing offers, and previous purchases. CRM can even offer suggestions for new products the customer might like based on trends and insights uncovered by AI.

Increase your bottom line

Using a CRM platform has been proven to produce real results across businesses. It helps employees save time, work more efficiently, uncover opportunities, and serve customers better. By using...Salesforce products, our global customers across businesses of all sizes have a proven track record of success, including: