A Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) allows companies to manage all of the interactions and evolving data related to prospects or customers. The software is primarily beneficial for sales teams continually accessing the data and actions of their sales processes.
Moreover, a CRM is particularly advantageous for four departments:
CRM increases sales (by up to 29%), improves productivity (by up to 34%) and boosts forecast accuracy (by 40%). (Source: Salesforce)
Centralized access to prospects and customers data has several advantages for a company including:
A CRM platform contains a dashboard that automatically updates customer and prospect data based on their interactions with company resources, emails and communications including:
A CRM is a customizable system that can house numerous integrations. Salesforce for example, can integrate more than 2500 applications.
There are three main types of CRM:
Operational CRM: The sales process (adding contacts, demonstrations, signatures...) is automated by the software.
Analytical CRM: Customer and prospect data is analyzed to provide a detailed account of key information and improve customer service.
Collaborative CRM: All collected data is distributed to the teams that are concerned by the information.
Each type of CRM has advantages not only for streamlining the sales process, but also for optimizing the activity of other activities in the company.
There are different CRM solutions on the market. Here are some of the top five:
Salesforce
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Hubspot
Sage
Oracle