What is CRM?

What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software?
CRM stands for "Customer Relationship Management" and is a software or technology that enables businesses to engage, nurture leads, turn prospects into customers, and retain existing clients. The main goals of using CRM are to boost relationships with clients, increase loyalty and close rates, and drive profits.
CRM systems allow companies to automate customer-related workflows and ensure all interactions with customers and prospects happen smoothly and efficiently across the customer journey. With CRM software, businesses can easily collect and manage customer data from multiple channels to build more detailed customer profiles, provide personalized customer engagements and ensure maximum productivity of customer-facing teams.
Who uses and benefits from CRM?
Deploying CRM software is beneficial for companies of any size. CRM solutions allow small business organizations to efficiently manage the customer journey without rudimentary worksheets or notebook entries. Moreover, small businesses can expand CRM capabilities following the company's growth by implementing a highly scalable solution with additional functionality.
Mid-size and enterprise-level organizations usually leverage CRM solutions to orchestrate workflows, unify and visualize data and break silos across departments for improved operational efficiency, productivity, and customer experience
As for internal departments, CRM software accelerates Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Business Development, Customer Success, and others. Let's take a closer look at the possibilities of CRM for different business users.










How does CRM software work?
СRM significantly simplifies daily work by automating various activities related to managing sales and marketing funnels, reporting, forecasting, analytics, etc. Customer Relationship Management Software can consolidate in one place all the data and communications from your leads: emails, chats and messengers, forms at the landing pages created with CRM, phone calls, etc.
A CRM system typically includes the following:
- Dashboards with deep dive analytics.
- A client database with detailed customer 360 profiles.
- Customer behavior and interaction tracking across all channels (website forms, e-commerce shopping carts, banners, buttons, and other interactive elements).
- AI/ML tools to suggest the most relevant next-best offer/next-best action for customer-facing teams.
- Data management, segmentation, and automation tools.
- Sales and marketing automation tools, detailed sales funnel analytics, forecasting, and intelligent scoring.
Companies can use those features to engage their customers through their preferred channels, such as websites, emails, advertising, phone calls, chatbots, etc. CRM systems enable managers to automate routine processes and measure team performance to improve operational efficiency further.
Here's an example of how a CRM system can benefit a medium or enterprise software company.
Let's say you work for a large software company that provides a wide range of products and services. Your sales team manages many different accounts, with some customers having multiple contact points within your organization.
- Using a CRM system, all customer data is centralized and easily accessible: customers' purchase history, preferences, and any issues they've had. This comprehensive vision lets your sales team understand customers' unique needs and tailor their interactions accordingly.
- CRM systems can help you to identify trends and opportunities for business growth, for example, determine which products or services are most popular, which geo regions have the most expansion potential, and which customer segments are most profitable.
- By having this information marketing team can clearly understand where they need to start. For example, which PPC activities should be created and which region and customer segment should be covered for a better result.
How does CRM software boost sales, marketing, and service?
Marketers
Run personalized campaigns to catch more leads
CRM systems enable marketers to build more targeted customer communications using a 360-degree customer view, marketing dashboards, AI/ML-powered tools for next-best action, product recommendations, and lead quality scoring.
With embedded campaign management tools, CRM software can enable marketers to design, manage, and optimize complex omnichannel marketing campaigns (email campaigns, banner ads, search ads, social media ads, ABM ads, etc.). in a single interface.
Track customer engagements across every touchpoint
Integrating marketing into your CRM allows users to capture online customer data via web pages and eCommerce websites, analyze intent data, track engagements with human-assisted chats and chatbots, monitor calls, and analyze social media data.
Customer behavior tracking allows users to monitor all customer interactions, analyze historical data, and utilize AI/ML-powered tools to create personalized offers and product suggestions through appropriate marketing channels.
Accelerate leads to revenue cycles
CRM enables marketers to streamline lead management workflows and design personalized marketing campaigns to engage customers and prospects better.
Stay aligned with the sales team and ensure all leads are qualified and handed off to sales managers on time.

Sales Managers
Automate sales processes to boost close rates
Sales professionals can use streamlined sales workflows that guide them through a complete sales cycle, from generating and nurturing leads to a successful deal closure. CRM systems can help identify process bottlenecks and help sales reps promote better customer engagements at each sales cycle stage.
CRM enables businesses to track individual sales rep performance, analyze sales teams' effectiveness, and identify top performers.
Manage sales of any type and complexity
With CRM software, businesses can automate long and short sales cycles, including B2C, B2B, or B2B2C. CRM allows users to manage multiple sales channels in a single workplace (agent desktop), with a 360-degree view of customer data and complete engagement history.
Automate and streamline opportunity management with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools that enable you to build data-backed scoring models, suggest the next best action/best offer and assess your sales process effectiveness.
Stay in touch with marketing and customer service

Operations Managers
Measure and improve performance
Integration of additional services

Business Owners
Informative dashboards
Identifying business growth channels

Deep dive into TOP-10 CRM Features
Dashboards & Analytics
Contact & Accounts Management

Lead & Opportunity Management

Orders, Invoices & Contracts

Field sales management

Campaign management

Service management

Workflow automation

Collaboration

AI/ML Data models

CRM industry solutions
What are the three types of CRM?
The main types of CRM are: collaborative, analytical, and operational.
Collaborative - enables companies to connect multiple departments, sometimes in different geo, and ensure their organized daily work based on single-source customer data. Collaborative CRMs are essential for distributed teams and businesses that apply a multi-faceted approach to customer acquisition and retention. Using a collaborative CRM, for example, your sales reps will have instant access to the customer's service history or history of marketing campaigns, thus giving them a complete profile of the customer's needs.
Operational - focuses on streamlining and automating diverse workflows for customer-facing teams. This type of CRM typically offers flexible tools to create, monitor and optimize customer-facing business processes. While collaborative CRMs emphasize single-source data access and unified data management, operational CRM systems focus on operational excellence, automation, and improved performance of each business unit.
Analytical - offers excellent reporting capabilities and ensures transparency of customer-facing activities for managers and executives. Analytical CRM provides value for large enterprises looking for solutions to visualize data. These CRMs feature multiple types of analytics, including interactive dashboards, campaign pipelines, workflow-embedded analytics, AI/ML-powered predictive analytics, and text & speech analytics.


Online vs. On-premise CRM?
There are two types of CRM development - online (or cloud-based) and on-premise (or local-based). Each has pros and cons, but in 2023 online CRM is preferable because it allows you to work from anywhere and quickly adapt to changing business realities.
With on-premise CRM, a company needs to purchase the licenses beforehand. Although it is the buyer's responsibility to ensure the constant maintenance of the on-premise system, including data security, the vendor will still provide technical support in critical circumstances. Considering that the software is on the company's servers, on-premise CRM is a good choice for organizations with strict security policies. Still, the implementation process takes more time, expenses, and IT resources.
On the other hand, software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud, or on-demand CRM stores data on the vendor's servers. In this case, the users have full access to the database at all times, wherever they are. Most importantly, the vendor takes all the responsibility for the seamless operation of the system and provides all the necessary system updates and support.
Cloud-based CRM software is highly scalable. An organization can quickly expand its functionality when business requirements grow or change. With online CRM software, a company must purchase licenses per user, and businesses can flexibly manage the required licenses.
Cloud-based vs On-Premise
FAQ
Why is Customer Relationship Management important?
What CRM software pricing is?
The cost of the CRM products is estimated per user/month and depends on many factors:
- Basic and additional functionality.
- Number of users.
- The type of system deployment (cloud or on-premise).
- Additional customization.
- Other factors.
Creatio CRM starts from $25 per user/month.
How can I choose the right CRM for my business?
What is No-code CRM?
