What is CRM Software?
CRM software is a centralized tool to manage and organize all interactions between a company’s sales and marketing interactions with current customers and sales prospects. CRM stands for customer relationship management. CRM software comes in different forms depending on each tool’s niche and serves both sales and marketing teams. For example, CRM can have sales development functionality for sales teams and marketing automation functionality for marketing teams. CRM software helps organize current customers and sales prospects. For example, sales reps can be assigned to different prospects to be able to track which person is assigned to which accounts. It can automate repetitive tasks, set up automatic actions such as sending a follow-up email or sending marketing materials based on certain purchase intent events that a sales prospect takes.
How Can CRM Software Help Sales and Marketing Teams Gather Sales Prospecting Intelligence?
Typically, CRM software has the functionality to compile data from different sources such as other marketing and sales tools to give sales and marketing teams a single source of insight and intelligence. For example, sales reps can analyze historical data on interactions or purchase intent indications to make a strategic and informed decision on the most effective personalized pitch to sales prospects. Because the these interactions are compiled into a single source, sales and marketing team can use this data to further optimize prospect pitches and communications.
Benefits of Integrating CRM Software with Other Sales and Marketing tools
In order to utilize CRM to their fullest potential, CRM software can integrate with all other sales and marketing tools. Sales and marketing teams, such as marketing operations, can set up integrations with other sales and marketing tools in order to flow data to their CRM. Setting up this data flow further improves efficiencies that a single data source can have for sales and marketing teams.
What Information Can CRM Software Store?
CRM software can be configured to store a wide range of data. Typically, CRM software stores prospect or current customer information such as firmographics, technographics, contact information for decision makers within a company, etc. CRM can also store data on interactions with prospects or current customers such as email nurturing, sales prospecting, purchase intent interactions, communication at previous events, and all other previous interactions. For current customers, CRM can store information such as current or previous business contracts, sales proposals, contact information for main points of contact, etc. It can also store data that is custom for a particular company. For example, If a company has custom stages in a sales pipeline, CRM software can be customized by adding fields specific to these custom stages.