What Is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to the principles, practices, and guidelines that an organization follows when interacting with its customers. From the organization’s point of view, this entire relationship encompasses direct interactions with customers, such as sales and service-related processes, forecasting, and the analysis of customer trends and behaviours. Ultimately, CRM serves to enhance the customer’s overall experience.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems can be easily customized to meet the specific needs of any business type and size. Start-ups, large enterprises, and verticals like real-estate, healthcare, insurance, legal, media, restaurants, travel, banking, tax, freelancers, and non-profits etc.

To get a little bit more specific, there are two groups of companies that often see the most benefit:

• B2B companies, which typically need to track leads and customers across long sales cycles and through upgrade paths (e.g., a software company, a recruiting firm)
• Considered-purchase B2C companies (e.g., a landscaping service, or a realtor)

That being said, there are a lot of companies out there who don’t fit the above two profiles, but still see value in using a CRM system. Another way to consider whether or not a CRM system can help your business is to think about the challenges that CRM systems aim to solve:

• Do you have a need for maintaining a central list of information on your leads and customers? Does this information live in several different places?
• Are your customers regularly interacting with multiple people on your team? How does everyone keep track of where the conversation with any one customer left off?
• Do you need a way to better understand the productivity of your sales team? Does your sales team have a structured process they follow?

If you answered yes to one or more of the above questions, chances are your business could benefit from a CRM system.