What is CRM? What is CRM Marketing? What is a CRM System? How Does it Work?

Whatis CRM ? Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business strategy that focuses on building and maintaining profitable relationships with customers. 

CRM involves collecting customer data, analyzing that data, and using it to personalize customer interactions and improve the overall customer experience. 

Watch this video to see how CRM helps you keep track of everything about your customers and your potential customers so you can build great relationships with them. 

A CRM system centralizes all your important customer and company data in one place, so your marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams have the right information to deliver the easy, connected experiences customers expect. 

CRM helps businesses unite everyone with one shared goal: keep your customers happy.

 

What is a CRM in Simple Words

A customer relationship management (CRM) solution helps you find new customers, win their business, and keep them happy by organising customer and prospect information in a way that helps you build stronger relationships with them and grow your business faster.

The main goals of CRM are to:

• Increase customer retention
• Increase sales
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Strengthen customer relationships
• Gain better customer insights

Benefits of CRM

1.  Increased customer retention:

CRM helps businesses to better understand their customers' needs and preferences, so they can offer more relevant and personalized products and services. This can help to increase customer retention and encourage customers to return for more.

2. Increased sales:

CRM can help businesses to identify new sales opportunities and increase average transaction value. By understanding their customers' needs and preferences, businesses can recommend more relevant products and services, which can lead to increased sales.

3. Improved customer satisfaction:

CRM can help businesses to provide better and more responsive customer service. By understanding their customers' needs and preferences, businesses can resolve customer issues more quickly and efficiently, which can lead to improved customer satisfaction.

4. Stronger customer relationships:

CRM can help businesses to build stronger relationships with their customers. By understanding their customers' needs and preferences, businesses can communicate with their customers in a more personal and relevant way, which can build trust and loyalty.

5. Better customer insights:

CRM can help businesses to collect valuable customer data. This data can be used to better understand customer needs and preferences, which can help businesses to improve their products and services, as well as their marketing strategies.

Types of CRM:

1. Operational CRM:
Operational CRM focuses on automating sales, marketing, and customer service tasks. It can help businesses to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations.

2. Analytical CRM:
Analytical CRM focuses on collecting and analyzing customer data. This data can be used to better understand customer needs and preferences, which can help businesses to improve their products and services, as well as their marketing strategies.

3. Collaborative CRM:
Collaborative CRM focuses on sharing customer information across the organization. This can help businesses to provide more consistent and personal customer service.

Today, many comprehensive CRM platforms integrate all parts of the customer relationship the business may have. However, some CRMs are still designed to target a specific aspect of it:

Sales CRM: to drive sales and increase the pipeline of new customers and prospects. Emphasis is placed on the sales cycle from tracking leads to closing deals.

Marketing CRM: to build, automate, and track marketing campaigns (especially online or via email), including identifying targeted customer segments. These CRMs provide real-time statistics and can use A/B testing to optimize strategies.

Service CRM: integrated dedicated customer service support with sales and marketing. Often features multiple contact points including responsive online chat, mobile, email, and social media.

Collaborative CRM: encourages the sharing of customer data across business segments and among teams to improve efficiency and communication and work seamlessly together.

Small Business CRM: optimized for smaller businesses with fewer customers to give those customers the best possible experience. These systems are often much simpler, intuitive, and less expensive to implement than enterprise CRM.

What is CRM Software

There are many CRM software solutions available on the market. CRM software can help businesses to manage their customer interactions more effectively. Some popular CRM software solutions include Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SugarCRM.

Special CRM software aggregates customer information in one place to give businesses easy access to data, such as contact data, purchase history, and any previous contact with customer service representatives. This data helps employees interact with clients, anticipate customer needs, recognize customer updates, and track performance goals when it comes to sales.

CRM software's main purpose is to make interactions more efficient and productive. Automated procedures within a CRM module include sending sales team marketing materials based on a customer's selection of a product or service. Programs also assess a customer's needs to reduce the time it takes to fulfill a request.

What is an Example of a CRM 

HubSpot is a CRM platform — meaning, it tracks customer relationships as well as facilitates marketing, sales, and service processes. 

HubSpot is ideal for any scaling business (whether you’re small, mid-sized, or enterprise) and any team (such as marketing, sales, customer service, operations, or C-suite). 

The platform combines Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and CMS — along with hundreds of available integrations — to help you align all internal teams, gather meaningful insights, report on (and share) success and growth opportunities, create remarkable customer experiences, increase adoption, and delight your target audience throughout every moment of the buyer’s journey. 

HubSpot serves as a single source of truth when it comes to managing your customer relationships — and with an exceptionally easy user experience (UX), you can spend more time on your customers and less time on software management and manual activities. 

And speaking of your customers, they are a major part of what differentiates HubSpot from other CRMs on the market — HubSpot centers everything you do around your customers and the customer experience. As a result, you’re able to grow better and help your customers grow better, too.

What is CRM Marketing

 

CRM marketing is a strategy that includes mindfully managing interactions with prospective and current customers throughout the sales process to promote positive perception of your brand. 

With CRM marketing, you can leverage data to create personalized communications. The goal is to build lasting relationships with the recipients. 

This helps you drive sales, improve customer retention, and increase revenue throughout the customer lifecycle. CRM tools are often leveraged by sales teams. 

But marketers—especially those with small businesses and agencies—also use specialized CRM marketing software to aid in the creation of those personalized campaigns.

What is a CRM System

Fundamentally, a CRM system allows you to manage the business relationships you have with your customers to help you grow your business. 

In fact CRM goes far beyond customers, allowing you to focus on your organisation's relationships with all sorts of people – colleagues, suppliers and service users as well as customers. 

How does it do this? At the most basic level, a CRM system provides a central place where you can store customer and prospect contact information, and share it with colleagues. 

Once this is in place you can track the history of all your interactions you have with those customers: phone calls made, emails sent, meetings held, presentations delivered, enquiries received. 

Because tracking is everything. With a CRM system in place, every question, every service request, every preference and every past contact detail about every customer is at your fingertips. And that means that every contact you have with your customers is always personal, relevant and up to date. 

By understanding your customers better, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities become clear – giving you the chance to win new business from existing customers. 

And as well as tracking contact histories, you can also add notes, schedule follow-ups and organise the next steps that you or your colleagues need to take. 

That means you need never miss an opportunity to close particular deals or grow customer accounts. These traditional functions of a CRM system, then, might include: 

- File and content sharing 

- Sales forecasting 

- Instant messaging between employees 

- Email integration with Outlook and Gmail 

- Dashboard-based analytics 

But modern CRM platforms such as Salesforce go much further, integrating with marketing automationand customer service systems to provide a complete, cloud-based ecosystem for customer data.