What Is a CRM System and How Does It Work?

A CRM System (Customer Relationship Management) is used to manage interactions with current and prospective customers, often during the sales process. Although CRM refers to all approaches that use data to build, improve and manage customer relationships, it is often used in reference to software or tech.

A successful CRM should help businesses to organise and analyse customer information and data, in order to streamline and improve customer communication and relationships. This will look different across all departments and businesses —at Datalyse, our CRM’s mission is to help sales teams personalise, automate and improve customer experience — but could include being able to:

1. Modify and manage customer profiles and interactions in real time.
2. Record, measure, and manage all interactions that agents have with customers.
3. Queue inbound calls, with automatic distribution to agents.
4. Automate workflows and menial tasks with AI and Process Automation.
5. Consolidate all data in one easy-to-access place.
6. Conduct in-depth analysis of all business activities, in order to measure ROI of marketing efforts and visualise their real impact on sales.

In short, a CRM should function as a central hub that allows your business to better understand and connect with your customers and contacts — however that might look like for you.

As you can imagine then, CRMs have become a near-essential for customer-facing teams in recent years — in particular for those in sales. In fact, 65% of businesses adopt CRM technology within the first 5 years of launch, with this number expected to continue to increase.

The great news is that CRM’s have become more accessible, and far easier to learn, implement and pay for in recent years, which means that businesses of all sizes can get involved and reap the benefits.

What Is Sales Automation in CRM?

Sales automation is the “mechanisation of manual, time-consuming sales tasks” — and it can be done with CRMs. CRM’s aim to manage and automate the menial tasks that sales agents and managers are faced with on a regular basis, in order to increase the efficiency, productivity and performance of the wider team.

“Effective sales organisations are 81% more likely to be practising consistent usage of a CRM or other system of record.” Nutshell, (2021).

“Firms using CRMs increase their sales by 29% on average.” Review42 (2022).

Benefits of CRMs

Sales automation is just one of the key benefits of CRMs. Other benefits include ensuring sales leads aren’t missed, that response time is reduced (which improves customer satisfaction), that budget is used as efficiently as possible, and that sales, marketing efforts, customer service, accounting, management and so on are as streamlined as possible. When done right, CRMs lead to an increase in sales, and a higher customer retention rate.

74% of respondents say that CRM solutions give them better access to customer data, allowing for a more personalised service. FindStack, (2021).

82% of the respondents said “Active customer retention” is one of the most important objectives for their CRM team. HubSpot, (2022).

With a CRM, you never need to fear lost notes, a missed lead or slow response times ever again. Datalyse is an engagement CRM platform for managing high sales volume with ease. We help our clients sell more. Find out how a CRM can help your team on our website, or contact us on +44 29 2168 0133.

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