What is a CRM? A Full Information to CRMs in 2022

Today’s sales pipelines can have dozens of touchpoints. Keeping up with your customers is a challenge for any business, and even more so for small businesses and solopreneurs. 

But with a CRM solution, you can bring all the data you’ll need for your sales and marketing strategies into a single platform. It boosts your efficiency and productivity and gives your customers a more personalized experience.

This article will guide you through what a CRM does, who should use it, and how it helps your business. Then, we’ll take a look at how CRM automation can help your business grow even further.

What is a CRM system in simple words? 

CRM, or customer relationship management, is the software, tools, and strategies that help you build and maintain relationships with your customers. 

CRM most often refers to a software tool that helps carry out the activities needed to maintain these relationships. 

It helps you track all customer interactions with your brand and personalize your sales and marketing campaigns to each customer at scale.

What does a CRM system do? 

A CRM integrates with other platforms and tools and helps you track and create a complete image of what your customers do online and offline.

If you’re wondering why you should care, it’s because it helps you create better experiences for your customers and leads.

69% of customers appreciate personalization, but only if based on data they’ve directly shared with the business. And 53% of businesses say first-party data is higher quality than third-party. A CRM helps you aggregate first-party data and deliver these personalized experiences effectively.

Let’s break down how exactly a CRM helps you achieve this.

• Track and compile customer data across channels: By integrating with other services like an ecommerce platform or social media tools, it gets access to user actions in real time across channels.
• Track, nurture, and score leads: You can use these additional data points to score leads and assign them to the right sales reps.
• Contact management: Store and provide easy access to relevant contact information for all leads and customers.
• Build and manage sales pipelines: Create processes that make it easier for your sales team to close deals at scale.

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• Track customer actions to provide a personalized experience: Integrate with ecommerce platforms, websites, and point of sale systems to track your customers’ purchases and other actions. You can also personalize your sales and marketing efforts.
• Gather, analyze, and report on data: Beyond personalization, you can use detailed information to make data-based decisions about adjusting your marketing messaging, target market, etc.
• Incorporate automation to speed up sales/marketing tasks: In a hectic workday, it’s easy for sales reps to forget to send a message or leave a note. With a CRM, you can automate tasks like post-call notes and tags or notifications to senior sales reps when certain actions take place.
• Breaks down barriers/silos between departments: One issue a lot of companies face is a disconnect between sales, marketing, and customer service. With CRM, you can integrate data from the departments’ various tools, destroy silos, and improve cooperation.

Who can use a CRM?

Do you run a business that sells any kind of product or service to any level of customer (whether business or consumer)? 

A CRM tool can help you better understand your customer needs and optimize your sales, marketing, and customer support efforts. It can help you streamline your efforts and deliver a unified customer experience across channels.

Just 24% of businesses say they are successfully doing omnichannel personalization, with silos and infrastructure as key barriers.

A CRM can help you bridge that gap.

Use cases for sales teams

Sales teams often struggle to give customers the experience they want. 77% of B2B buyers say their last purchase was difficult or complex. A CRM can help simplify it for everyone. 70% of sales professionals say a CRM system is very important in closing deals.

Sales teams can use a CRM to:

• Identify and track leads and prospects.
• Automate lead scoring and evaluation efforts.
• Prioritize VIP clients and high-value potential customers.
• Build/manage/optimize sales pipelines.
• Find opportunities for cross-selling, upselling, new tactics, etc.
• Keep everyone on the same page and offer seamless transitions when customers move between sales reps.
• Collaborate and share data with marketing departments to provide a better experience overall.
• Create a complete image of every customer journey and all their interactions with your business.

This is what a customer profile looks like inside the ActiveCampaign Sales CRM, for example.

Use cases for marketing teams

Marketing departments often work from vague personas rather than a real-time image of their customers. 

Marketing departments can use a CRM to:

• Qualify and nurture leads to send to sales.
• Segment customers and prospects based on gathered data, leading to more impactful marketing.
• Plan, execute, and automate personalized campaigns.
• Automate tasks like drip campaigns and follow-ups.

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  Lead Scoring Actions

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  Lead Nurturing Automation

In the ActiveCampaign CRM, you can set up an automated workflow for nurturing high-quality leads before sending them on to sales.

Use cases for customer service teams

Customer support teams have crucial insights into customer issues and needs but often don’t get included in marketing, sales, and product conversations. 

An integrated CRM makes support data visible to everyone and leads to a more complete image of your customers.

Customer support teams can use a CRM to:

• Track support ticket resolution across channels.
• Identify common problem areas for support content.
• Solve issues and complaints quickly.
• Flag major issues for sales/marketing/product teams to remedy.

7 top benefits of CRM software

CRM solutions can help you address various core business needs, from better managing customer data and bridging silos to delivering personalized experiences for each customer.

Let’s take a closer look at the seven top benefits of using a CRM platform.

1. Keep data from multiple channels in one central platform

Integrate your CRM with other apps and tools to centralize all first-party data on your customers. Have one source of truth on customers for all teams, including phone calls, purchases, support tickets, and more.

2. Eliminate silos between departments for a better customer experience

Give teams that work together, or in adjacent areas, access to the same CRM data and an easy way to collaborate.

Marketing, sales, and support can all document their interactions with a customer, so the next person can pick up where the previous one left off.

A consistent experience is key to driving customer loyalty.

3. Use customer data to deliver personalized experiences

By using deep customer information and real actions, you can create custom segments and personalize your marketing and sales efforts.

For example, Australian-based social-research firm McCrindle uses ActiveCampaign to track event attendees and deliver tailored sales messages through a BigMarker integration.

McCrindle also relies on the ActiveCampaign API to attribute lead sources like Facebook Ads or LinkedIn to any new leads that come in through its campaigns.

These processes help reveal 900 qualified leads every month, like clockwork.

An effective CRM strategy helps you tailor marketing messages based on where leads come from, actions they take — like attending events or downloading a case study — and much more.

Personalization is the key to landing more sales opportunities, improving customer satisfaction, and maximizing lifetime value and profitability.

4. Identify new sales opportunities

With access to detailed real-time data, you can find ways to cross or upsell to existing customers. For example, you might notice customer complaints about issues that an add-on product can solve.

Plus, lead scoring and nurturing help your sales team only work with leads that are ready to buy, maximizing the return on every sales call. That way, you can focus on red-hot, high-value leads.

5. Automate tasks to increase efficiency and productivity

The sales process used to include a lot of menial tasks like collecting customer information into spreadsheets and sending emails to set up sales calls.

A CRM lets you automate things like data collection and analysis, lead scoring, lead nurturing campaigns, and even appointment setting.

You can also use automations to ensure your sales reps always contact the hottest leads at the right time.

For example, you can set up automated notifications to deal owners when their leads take certain actions on your site — like downloading a white paper.

6. Become more remote-friendly with a cloud CRM

More sales and marketing teams are working remotely. In 2021, 53% of sales professionals worked from home at least 50% of the time. 67% of sales managers said managing remote salespeople was more challenging than expected.

In the old days of CRM technology, you’d have to install an on-premises solution and maintain the system yourself. That also made it hard — if not impossible — to access and use the CRM while out of the office.

Luckily, the world of CRM has mostly transitioned to software-as-a-service (SaaS) by now. A cloud-based CRM can be accessed from anywhere, and with security features like 2-factor authentication and end-to-end encryption, your customer and internal data is safe.

As a result, companies that once used only on-premises or both types of CRM are mostly transitioning to the cloud.

The best CRM software makes it easy for your employees to collaborate and deliver a consistent customer experience even when working from home.

7. Optimize the sales cycle and customer experience

With access to a centralized dashboard of customer data, you can methodically work through and optimize your sales cycle.

You can improve everything from which reps handle what type of leads to your entire lead nurturing process.

With access to feedback from customer support, you can also implement changes to product, marketing, and onboarding to drive a better customer experience. 

Every customer engagement is a chance to learn more — and a CRM makes it possible.

How does CRM automation work? And how to use it to drive more sales

CRM automation speeds up manual admin tasks and empowers your sales teams to close more valuable deals by automatically highlighting high-value leads.

Examples of sales automation include:

• Automatic lead scoring based on actions.
• Automatic lead nurturing based on scores and customer engagement.
• Segmenting customers based on demographics, actions, and more.
• Personalizing promotions for customers and free users.
• Automatic post-sales follow-up emails.

To take advantage, you need a CRM with powerful workflow and sales automation tools built into the platform.

Then, you can use the automation builder to create workflows that enhance and speed up your sales cycle:

For example,

• You can add downloading a case study as a trigger for sending an email to schedule a sales call.
• You can automatically segment marketing list audiences based on interactions with your website, like viewing a holiday gift guide.

These types of rules can help businesses market more effectively and reach leads when they’re ready to buy.

By striking while the iron is hot, you also reduce the risk of leads falling out of the pipeline without buying.

By using these types of automations, American sales consultancy Smart Gets Paid grew its number of contacts by 27x and reduced time spent on admin tasks by 50%.

The company also uses automation to segment leads based on their purchases, downloads, and other actions that leads take on the website.

With ActiveCampaign’s drag-and-drop automation builder, you can easily create workflows even more advanced than this.

Segment your audience based on a combination of location, demographics, and customer interactions to start personalizing your marketing message today. That’s the first step to creating a solid email marketing strategy for your business.

This is only scratching the surface of what you can do with CRM automations. 

You can go beyond customer engagement and smooth out various internal business processes, like reporting. You can automatically create performance reports for different platforms, including the lifetime values of real customers. 

You can even use data from multiple channels along with the real sales data in your CRM for forecasting the return on various campaigns and planning your marketing spend more efficiently.

Frequently-asked questions about CRM systems

If you still have questions about CRMs, don’t worry. Below, we answer some of the most common questions we receive about using a CRM.

Can small businesses use a CRM? 

Yes, small businesses, startups, and even solopreneurs can use and take advantage of a CRM. A CRM integrates different tools and apps, centralizes data, and helps one person manage their different business tasks more effectively.

As a small business, the trick is to find a flexible and easy-to-use platform that doesn’t require a massive development team to code integrations from scratch. For example, ActiveCampaign features over 870+ native integrations that you can set up with a few clicks.

What is CRM for digital marketing?

In digital marketing, customer relationship management is focused on personalizing experiences. The goal is to send the right message to the right person at the right time.

One example is sending a sales email about an advanced course to someone who attended a live event where you covered a specific topic.

Marketing teams can often focus too much on just acquiring new customers. A CRM highlights the value of customer retention and will help you maximize the lifetime value by delivering a better and more unified customer experience across multiple channels.

What is a CRM in real estate?

Like in general digital marketing, a CRM in real estate allows you to get to know each individual customer, deliver personalized marketing materials, and grow your relationship.

You can go beyond the mere demographics and see how they interact with different properties on your website, helping you develop a better sales strategy.

How can we improve the adoption rates of our CRM?

For many companies, getting your employees to start using a CRM is a real challenge. Here are some tips to help your company achieve a smooth adoption process:

• Choose the right CRM for your business — preferably one with existing integrations for tools and marketing platforms you already use.
• Come up with a detailed CRM implementation process plan.
• Use simple standards and processes for inputting and cleaning data.
• Use workflow automation to actively make your employees’ jobs easier.

Take your business to the next level with a CRM

A CRM helps you keep up with your customer relationships, building loyalty, and improving your bottom line. From sales to marketing to customer support, every part of your business can benefit from a CRM with sales and marketing automation.

CRM features make it easy to personalize every email, social media message, and phone call. It’s the cornerstone of any marketing, sales, or service strategy that puts the customer first. You can streamline your entire sales cycle and make your existing customers happier.
If you want to test the powers of a CRM for free, take advantage of the 30-day free trial for the ActiveCampaign Sales CRM.