A customer relationship management (CRM), is simply any software that organizes any interactions between your company and its prospects. CRM collects business contacts, email and phone communication, notes and any other information that provides context to the salesperson and organization as a whole to move the sale forward.
According to HubSpot, the biggest challenge that companies face when implementing a CRM is the standard data required to keep it up to date. This is followed by a lack of integrations and salesperson buy-in.
Then why use a CRM in the first place? CRMs do more than just gather all your contacts all in one place. They provide managers with a real-time overview of their sales efforts while enabling salespeople to measure and improve their performance against their organization's benchmarks.
One of the most significant issue's sales teams face is sorting through countless emails, call logs, notes and other types of data just to find the information they need. A CRM’s primary function is to provide a clean and bright view of your prospects’ data for the entire company; Which saves everyone from having to chase down data across different silos to get data, as everyone who has access to the CRM will be able to access the information quickly.
CRMs could also serve as a system for reps as they can use dashboards, pipelines, and summaries to let them know if they are meeting their quota.
Your sales team doesn’t have to use up valuable resources sending requests to marketing to get what they need. The value in a CRM is that the entire sales team has access to it, making it easier for sales teams to communicate efficiently with one another.
CRMs help streamline reporting, making it easier for managers to examine data and look into a bigger picture. Once set up, a CRM allows managers to forecast and improve upon their current sales process.