What is a CRM?

CRM is the acronym used for Customer Relationship Management and refers to the set of practices, business strategies and technologies focused on customer relationships.

By having a CRM system, companies of all sizes can stay connected with customers, optimize processes, improve profitability and drive business growth.

1-CRM: Definition & Concepts

We already know that CRM is the acronym used for «Customer Relationship Management.» However, the full definition of CRM goes further: it is an integrated management of sales, marketing, customer service and all points of contact.

We are in the era of the customer, of digital transformation and new technologies. In this scenario, relationships also evolve and this phenomenon has given rise to the emergence of a concept known as customer experience. Therefore, the experience provided by a CRM implies being customer-centric. It is a much broader concept than software or platform: it is a strategy, a process, a tool and a technology.

CRM platforms are on the list of the most important and innovative corporate technologies available to companies. Why? Because of the way they use customer information to manage accounts, leads and sales opportunities in one place.

Read on to learn more about the features and types of CRM solutions and what these platforms do.

2-What Does a CRM Do?

CRM stores information about current and potential customers (such as name, address, phone number, etc.) and identifies their activities and points of contact with the company. This includes customer visits to the site, phone calls made, email exchanges, and various other interactions.

It is important to note that the CRM system is not just an elaborate contact list, as above all, it collects and integrates valuable data to prepare and update your teams with personal information about customers, their purchase histories, and their preferences.

A CRM platform:

3-Why is a CRM important and what are its benefits?

CRM helps your company get rid of outdated processes and manual effort so your business can move forward. The platform organizes accounts and contacts in an accessible, real-time way, speeding up and simplifying the sales process.

Instead of relying on sticky note reminders or spending all your time analyzing spreadsheets, you can send leads to your sales team quickly and easily. That way, all team members, no matter where they are or what they’re doing, are always working with up-to-date information about customers and their interactions with the company. With data in plain sight and easy access, it’s easier to collaborate and increase productivity.

With a CRM system:

4-What are the types of CRM?

When it comes to CRM types, there are two paths businesses can take, depending on their needs and budget: Cloud CRM and On-Premise CRM.

Local CRM.

Local CRM, also known as On-Premise CRM, is the type of CRM that is hosted on a physical server of the company and requires maintenance by an in-house IT team. In this case, it is necessary to install the CRM software on the server or on a computer that is used as such.

Cloud CRM

Cloud CRM is based on cloud computing. We can say that it is an online CRM and therefore it is not installed on a computer nor does it require your company to have a dedicated IT team to maintain the software.

This is also the reason why online CRM can be called software as a service (SaaS), since the entire infrastructure is managed remotely by the solution’s team of experts.

With a cloud-based CRM, your team only needs to access the login page from anywhere and at any time, via the browser, on any device or through the app.

Online CRM

Advantages:

• Accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
• Accessible from anywhere and from any mobile device
• The initial investment is minimal
• It does not require server maintenance and updates are automatic
• It securely accompanies the growth of the company

Disadvantages:

• Depends on internet connection, but can sync with offline data

CRM On-Premise

Advantages:

• Greater server control by IT teams

Disadvantages:

• A power outage can cause a delay in system usage
• Upfront costs with setup and installation are high
• Need to hire an IT team to manage the server and perform maintenance
• Less flexible and upgrades can be costly

What is Cloud Computing?

We know that online CRM is the result of advances in technologies such as cloud computing. But you may be wondering: what is cloud computing?

Simply put, cloud computing is a technology that allows remote access to software, file storage, and data processing via the Internet. In this model, there is no need to install applications locally on computers. Salesforce has been a pioneer in this type of service, offering a secure, easily accessible solution with many more features for small, medium, and large businesses.

5-What is CRM in Sales?

When we talk about CRM for sales, we are referring to the part of a CRM whose function is to help your company sell more in less time. In an intelligent way, CRM performs simple tasks in an automated way so that your sales department can concentrate on the important stages for conversion.

CRM and the Stages of the Sales Funnel

Are you familiar with the term sales funnel? It represents the entire process of conducting business, from the moment of prospecting to the final conversion.

And this is precisely why using CRM is so important for your company: the best way to increase the effectiveness of your sales process is by controlling and recording relevant customer information.

For your team, CRM means a solution to help manage the pipeline and optimize the process of capturing opportunities, negotiating and closing sales in a fast, organized and well-defined way.

Sales Cloud: The Salesforce CRM

Our pioneering cloud computing solution is Sales Cloud. As a result of our efforts to improve your experience, we have been positioned as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for more than 13 consecutive years.

Sales Cloud is the most advanced sales CRM on the market and allows you to take advantage of all the automation resources you need in a single platform. The tool offers a wide variety of functionalities and services that go beyond traditional relationship management: with it, you can develop personalized and customized applications according to your needs. Get a 360° view and optimize your entire decision-making process!

6-What is a CRM in Marketing?

We’re used to associating CRM with sales, but marketing is also fundamental to customer relationships. When you have software that integrates sales and marketing processes, you can accompany the customer’s journey throughout the funnel.

Companies no longer need to be passive, just waiting for a potential customer to come into contact: they can take the initiative with business strategies and objectives built on the disruptive, accelerated and ultra-connected reality we are living in.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the use of tools and solutions provided by new digital technologies to automate all digital marketing processes, eliminating manual tasks that require a lot of effort and allowing the supervision of all actions that generate contact points.

It is an ally that helps marketing teams to prioritize and focus on the strategies and insights that really matter, with agility and efficiency. Digital technologies made possible the advancement of marketing automation, which in turn paved the way for companies to increasingly focus on the customer journey.

All of this is carried out in a personalized way, which guarantees that the impact produced on customers with different interests is equally optimal to achieve the same final objective: closing more deals.

Marketing Cloud: The Marketing CRM from Salesforce.

Our automation tool, Marketing Cloud is a cloud-based platform that puts relevant, personalized journeys at your disposal across all channels and devices, allowing marketers to deliver the right message, at the right time, at every stage of the customer relationship.

7-What is a Customer Service CRM?

CRM and After Sales

Post-sales is the stage that brings together customer service strategies designed to improve their experience after a conversion. With a CRM, post-sales becomes much more precise: this way, you can personalize customer service and solve problems before they even arise.

Implementing a CRM platform allows for full integration between all your pre-sales, sales and post-sales actions, as well as being a way to improve customer service and multi-channel support. The chances of closing more deals increase when your customer has good experiences.

Service Cloud: The Salesforce Customer Service CRM

We’ve already mentioned that consumer expectations for customer service are increasing every day. To give your teams an integrated view of each customer and business opportunity, your CRM needs to be integrated with the experience. At Salesforce, the platform that enables that integration is Service Cloud.

8-What is the difference between CRM and ERP?

The acronym ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. It is a system based on IT solutions for managing organizational processes, especially financial processes
(such as accounts payable, invoicing and planning).

Find out below how an ERP differs from a CRM and how both can help your company.

CRM

• Its function is to help improve the performance of the sales team.
• It makes it possible to better understand the consumer journey and, thus, develop more effective sales techniques in terms of customer acquisition and conversion.
• It improves the relationship with customers and leads by creating the ideal environment to maintain these relationships for much longer.

ERP

• Its function is to connect the company’s information flows.
• It makes processes more fluid and efficient, eliminating bureaucratic bottlenecks and standardizing processes, thus ensuring higher quality in customer service.
• It provides strategic information to all sectors at the same time, streamlining decision-making in your company.

The integration between these two systems allows you to further streamline the flow of information in your company, improving the performance and quality of the work performed.

9-Does my company need a CRM?

If you’re still unsure whether your business would benefit from using a CRM, here’s a list of signs that indicate the need for a CRM:

• You have teams that work together, even if they don’t share the same physical space;
• You have a long or complex sales cycle;
• Your sales teams travel frequently;
• You can’t quickly find customer data to make decisions on the fly;
• You feel like deals are going unnoticed because you’re handling everything in spreadsheets and notebooks;
• Your prospects and customers have multiple touchpoints;
• You have multiple applications that you call CRM, but they’re not actually connected to a single database or system of record;
• Your business is growing faster than you anticipated;
• You know your company’s customer experience is poor or you’re losing too many customers due to service issues;
• You or your IT department are overloaded with maintenance requests.

What is the best CRM solution for my business?

Now that you’ve learned so much about CRM, you may have doubts about which is the best solution for your company’s segment and size. In this case, the way to go is to find the CRM that best suits your needs.

Salesforce knows how important that decision is and, therefore, has products designed for different realities and develops solutions for small and medium-sized companies and also for businesses in various industries.

CRM for Industries

Companies from a wide variety of segments, each with its own challenges and specificities, are entering the digitalization process and, with it, heading towards the Fourth Industrial Revolution. CRM for Industries plays an essential role in this transformation, a transformation driven by customer experience.

That is why Salesforce thinks about the details of each industry to help them all grow, develop and improve customer relationships. Our products are built around the needs of each segment, helping all companies connect with their consumers in a completely new way.

The financial sector, for example, is experiencing a true revolution due to digital, social and mobile innovations, which impact both banking and lending services as well as asset management, wealth and insurance services. With its financial services management solutions, Salesforce helps companies move from defensive to offensive.

Another segment that faces new challenges and takes advantage of new opportunities is Health and Life Sciences. With Salesforce’s Health Cloud, you’ll be ready for this new world! It’s a platform that connects conversations, devices, processes, services, and patient data in an innovative way.

At Salesforce, you can also find CRM solutions focused on industries such as: manufacturing, retail, consumer goods, automotive, and more.

CRM for Small Business.

If you have a small business, you need a CRM, too. But in practice, why use a CRM in this context?

If you have customers, you can benefit from CRM. Even if your customer base is small, no one can single-handedly memorize and organize every interaction (those that have already occurred or those that still need to be done).

With a CRM for SMEs, you have a powerful business tool at hand, one that simplifies processes, provides valuable business insights, and virtually connects your company’s employees so they can act as a team in real time.

For startups and smaller businesses, customer relationship management drives growth through the right technologies and offers a real opportunity to compete on the same level as large companies.

10- CRM and Artificial Intelligence

When we talk about Artificial Intelligence, or AI, we’re talking about deep learning and machine learning, as well as natural language processing. These terms point to a future of systems that are smart enough to learn from our interactions and data, anticipate our needs, and take over common tasks.

Thanks to AI, it’s possible to predict the next ideal sales, marketing, or customer service interaction for each customer. Sales will be able to forecast opportunities and prioritize the best leads.

Customer service teams will provide the next generation of proactive service, preventing system failures or answering frequently asked questions in a customer community before those failures or questions lead to hard-to-solve cases. Marketing will be able to create predictive journeys for all customers, personalizing experiences like never before.

11- CRM and Blockchain.

In 2026, Salesforce introduced the first blockchain platform for CRM. You may have heard of blockchain, but have you ever wondered how this new technology will affect CRM and what it will change for your business?

For CRM, blockchain means more security through an anti-fraud system, more clarity and transparency in information, and more trust in negotiations and transactions.

Sometimes, teams using a CRM may be subject to dealing with inaccurate or duplicate data. Through blockchain, your company can have a clearer and more accurate view of the interaction with each user. As a result, insights are better planned, helping your business to be more efficient.

In addition, with the rise of data protection regulations (such as GDPR regulation), CRM platforms must update the way they work with user data. Due to its decentralization, blockchain allows personal data to be stored and encrypted and verified without having to share private data.

12- CRM FAQ.

1.How will a CRM save me time?

A huge benefit of CRM is automating time-consuming, routine tasks, saving countless hours. This frees up your team’s time to focus on sales.

As an example, imagine you want to create a follow-up email about a marketing job. With a good CRM solution, you don’t need to remember which leads you want to target. You can simply create some rules for your leads and automate marketing work, such as email campaigns and lead nurturing, so that leads quickly reach the sales reps (SDRs) who will follow up. Mailing templates that can be created in the CRM solution ensure that you don’t have to repeat work or even cut and paste.

The result? You can seize opportunities faster or close more deals in less time. CRM also allows you to pull in data like deal or pipeline size and create dashboards to help you make informed decisions. You can quickly check the status of transactions, revenue, and more.

2.Can the CRM be customized for what’s important to my business?

Of course, every business is run differently, with different processes and ideas of success. This means that a good CRM solution should be easily customizable and have a hierarchy of information that puts what matters to you at the forefront. The best CRMs feature drag-and-drop customization capabilities and automatically provide regular updates that won’t affect those customizations—and they’ll do so with little to no involvement from the IT department!

3.Can I add features and resources without coding or help from IT?

It’s hard to find a company that doesn’t use email or other basic business applications on a daily basis. CRM offers you great opportunities to help you extend the power of those systems, connecting to them and integrating with programs like Outlook or QuickBooks in the blink of an eye. You can download business applications and integrate them quickly and seamlessly, acquiring the resources and capabilities your company needs.

4.Why Choose Salesforce for My Small Business CRM?

There is no shortage of CRM options. Yet only one continues to help more businesses succeed than any other. On average, Salesforce customers report 27% growth and a 42% increase in customer satisfaction.

The #1 Choice in the World

With hundreds of thousands of customers and millions of users, Salesforce is a proven choice and the #1 CRM in the world. We are committed to our customers’ success at every stage. Every day.

Cloud CRM Pioneers

In addition to being a cloud-based CRM solution, Salesforce pioneered cloud computing in 1999. That spirit continues to this day, leading Forbes to name our company most innovative four years in a row. No hardware, no software—just log in and start using it.

Solutions specific to small businesses

Salesforce offers many packages, including sales, customer service, and marketing software solutions—many built specifically for the needs of small businesses. And to optimize their usefulness, those solutions are integrated to work as a complete CRM solution for your business.

Automatic Upgrades

Because Salesforce is 100% cloud-based, you can provide three automatic upgrades each year based on customer feedback. And because apps are built on the Salesforce1 Platform, upgrades won’t affect the customizations you make to run your business the way you want. That’s why our solution is the best!

From the first contact with a potential customer to the engagement with an old account, our CRM helps businesses succeed in every aspect of customer service.

Connect with your customers in a whole new way: build more meaningful and lasting relationships, better understand customer needs, identify new opportunities to help them, resolve their problems quickly, and implement customer-centric applications in seconds. With a single view of every customer interaction, you’ll be able to sell, service, and market like never before.

Increase Your Sales

With a fast way to score and route leads, track opportunities, activities, and interactions, and gain visibility into all stages of the deal. Your logs can contain call logs and notes, deal and quote conversations, shared files, and more. You can also set up your CRM to create daily to-do lists, schedule call alerts, trigger emails, and more.

Find More Leads

Get access to filterable contact databases to find ideal prospects and decision makers. You’ll also find social data about those contacts and insights into the topics customers are talking about.

Keep More Customers

Using the integrated CRM not only reduces case and customer issue resolution time, but it also keeps agents happier and more satisfied (because they have the tools they need to do more for customers), boosts sales, and increases customer loyalty and overall satisfaction.

Join the hundreds of thousands of customers using the world’s #1 CRM

Now that you have all the essential information about CRM and understand how it works and its importance, you understand how essential it is to rely on efficient, organized and innovative systems.

Salesforce offers the most valued CRM on the market, used by more than 150,000 companies worldwide. Our solutions connect Sales, Marketing, Commerce, IT and Customer Service and provide a personalized experience for companies of all sizes and industries. In this way, we ensure that your company has all the tools and support it needs to generate value, drive growth and revolutionize its sales. Don’t miss the opportunity to explore this universe of possibilities.