Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business revenue through relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

When people talk about CRM, they are usually referring to a CRM system, a tool that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more.

A CRM solution helps you focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people — including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship.

A CRM system gives everyone — from sales, customer service, business development, recruiting, marketing, or any other line of business — a better way to manage the external interactions and relationships that drive success. A CRM tool lets you store customer and prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, record service issues, and manage marketing campaigns, all in one central location — and make information about every customer interaction available to anyone at your company who might need it.

With visibility and easy access to data, it's easier to collaborate and increase productivity. Everyone in your company can see how customers have been communicated with, what they’ve bought, when they last purchased, what they paid, and so much more. CRM can help companies of all sizes drive business growth, and it can be especially beneficial to a small business, where teams often need to find ways to do more with less.

CRM will be one of the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software. If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. You have targets for sales, business objectives, and profitability. But getting up-to-date, reliable information on your progress can be tricky. How do you translate the many streams of data coming in from sales, customer service, marketing, and social media monitoring into useful business information?

A CRM system can give you a clear overview of your prospect customers. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customizable dashboard that can tell you a customer’s previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.

You can even choose to include information from their public social media activity — their likes and dislikes, what they are saying and sharing about you or your competitors. Marketers can use a CRM solution to better understand the pipeline of sales or prospects coming in, making forecasting simpler and more accurate. You’ll have clear visibility of every opportunity or lead, showing you a clear path from inquiries to sales. Some of the biggest gains in productivity can come from moving beyond CRM as a sales and marketing tool and embedding it in your business – from HR to customer services and supply-chain management.

A customer relationship management (CRM) solution helps you find new customers, win their business, and keep them happy by organizing customer and prospect information in a way that helps you build stronger relationships with them and grow your business faster. CRM systems start by collecting a customer's website, email, telephone, social media data, and more, across multiple sources and channels. It may also automatically pull in other information, such as recent news about the company's activity, and it can store personal details, such as a client's personal preferences on communications. The CRM tool organizes this information to give you a complete record of individuals and companies overall, so you can better understand your relationship over time.

Introducing a CRM platform has been shown to produce real results – including direct improvements to the bottom line. CRM applications have a proven track record of increasing Lead Conversion, Sales, Sales Productivity, Customer Satisfaction, Faster Decision Making and Revenue.

A CRM system can help you identify and add new leads easily and quickly, and categorize them accurately. By focusing on the right leads, sales can prioritize the opportunities that will close deals, and marketing can identify leads that need more nurturing and prime them to become quality leads.

With complete, accurate, centrally held information about clients and prospects, sales and marketing can focus their attention and energy on the right clients.

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

With better visibility, you’ll also be able to keep your customers happy with better service. Happy customers are likely to become repeat customers, and repeat customers spend more — up to 33% more according to some studies.

Today's customers expect fast, personalized support, at any time of day or night. A CRM system can help you provide the high-quality service that customers are looking for. Your agents can quickly see what products customers have ordered, and they can get a record of every interaction so they can give customers the answers they need, fast.

CRM can be quick and easy to implement. A cloud-based system doesn’t need special installation, and there’s no hardware to set up, keeping IT costs low and removing the headache of version control and update schedules.

Generally, cloud-based CRM systems are priced on the number of users who access the system and the kinds of features you need. This can be very cost-effective in terms of capital outlay, and is also extremely flexible — enabling you to scale up and add more people as your business grows. Salesforce is flexible in terms of functionality, too — you’re not paying for any features that are not useful to you.