More than anything else, the relationship with a business’s customers is key to its growth. Not only are customers the lifeblood of any business, but if you lack a way to manage them effectively and efficiently, you will likely lose them and have difficulty gaining new ones. That is why many businesses need to implement an organization system and software that can help them build sustainable relationships with their customers and keep these relationships by tracking customer data. This software is called a CRM.

But what is a CRM? Simply put, a CRM is a customer relationship management software which is used for automating the process of managing customer relationships. By doing so, employees and contractors in your marketing, sales, customer success, and accounting and finance departments can view all sorts of customer data and use it to make data-driven decisions about everything from marketing and sales initiatives to improving customer service outcomes and customer retention.

This is actually invaluable, as every department of your business can utilize a CRM in various ways to improve their own processes. For example, the sales team can utilize the data in a CRM to create an ideal customer profile for the business. This will help them better target their outreach and more quickly identify hot prospects.

The marketing team can also use the data within the CRM to segment prospects and customers. This will help them better identify demographic profiles and determine which demographics are most likely to be interested in what products. They can also utilize the customer data within the CRM to deliver personalized touch points. These touch points can be based on both demographic information and on how a customer has interacted with your business so far. For example, if a customer has already purchased a product or signed up for a free trial, you can make sure that they are targeted toward the right types of emails in a marketing funnel that will better help them convert.

The marketing department can also utilize data from a CRM for paid media. Using the advanced reporting features of a CRM, a business can generate customized reports based on customer data. They can also filter these reports to focus on the information they need to create a lookalike audience for their products and services. Once they are able to collate this data into a report, a marketing department can integrate it with external analytics tools to better track it.

There are, of course, numerous other ways that a business can use a CRM to build their business. Rather than just thinking of a CRM as a repository of information, a proactive business can use its advanced functionality to automate and refine their processes as well as generate advanced reports and assess demographic customer data. Using this data, customer profiles can be created in order to better target marketing and sales efforts. With a CRM, a company can do all this and more and transform the way that they interact with their customers and their relationships with them.