Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy and technology category for managing all of an organization's relationships and interactions with current and potential customers.
Definition
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy and technology category for managing all of an organization's relationships and interactions with current and potential customers. In Salesforce's context, CRM refers to the core platform and its functionality for tracking accounts, contacts, opportunities, cases, and activities. Salesforce is the world's leading CRM platform, providing cloud-based tools for sales, service, marketing, and more.
In plain English
“Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is both a strategy and the software that supports it. The strategy is about managing all your interactions with customers and prospects in one place. The software is what makes it practical. Salesforce is the biggest CRM platform in the world.”
Worked example
Tarryholme Software, like every modern company tracking customers and prospects, runs Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The CRM is the system of record for every Account, Contact, Opportunity, Case, and Activity - the data and processes around customer interactions across sales, service, marketing, and support. Salesforce, the world's leading CRM platform, provides the cloud-based tools that make CRM practical at any scale; smaller companies use simpler CRMs, but the core idea is the same. CRM is both a strategy (treat customer relationships as a unified asset) and the software that supports it.
Why Customer Relationship Management (CRM) matters
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a category of business strategy and technology focused on managing an organization's relationships and interactions with current and potential customers. The goal is to centralize customer data, track every interaction, and use that information to build stronger relationships, streamline sales, improve customer service, and inform marketing. As a software category, CRM typically includes features for managing accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, activities, cases, and campaigns.
Salesforce launched as a CRM platform in 1999 and has grown to become the world's leading CRM provider. The core Salesforce platform is built around the CRM data model (Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, Cases), with additional Clouds layered on top for specialized use cases: Marketing Cloud for campaign management, Commerce Cloud for e-commerce, Experience Cloud for customer portals, and so on. The CRM concept is what ties everything together: whatever customer-facing work is happening, the goal is to have a single source of truth about the customer and their relationship with the organization.
How organizations use Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Runs their entire sales, service, and marketing operation on Salesforce CRM. The unified CRM data model means every team sees the same customer information, which drives their cross-functional reporting and KPI dashboards.
Built a CRM analytics practice on top of Salesforce data. Their reports and dashboards surface insights that are only possible when every customer interaction lives in the same CRM.
Migrated from a legacy CRM to Salesforce to unify three separate customer databases into a single source of truth. The consolidation took a year but eliminated the data inconsistencies that had been frustrating their teams for years.
Test your knowledge
Q1. What does CRM stand for?
Q2. What is Salesforce's position in the CRM market?
Q3. What's the core goal of CRM?
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