What is CRM?

CRM stands for customer relationship management: managing the relationship with your customers and prospects. In practice, people usually mean the program in which that happens. It starts with a list of contacts and companies but goes further. It keeps track of which emails and conversations there have been, which quote is open and which agreement still has to be kept.

For an SME the gain is mainly overview. Without a CRM, knowledge about a customer sits in one colleague's mailbox, in a spreadsheet or in someone's head. If that person drops out, the knowledge is gone. With a CRM everyone sees the same data and your team knows who takes the next step.

The core of a CRM is the pipeline: the stages a deal passes through, from first contact via quote to order. For each stage you see how many deals there are and what they are worth together. Reports follow from that, so management does not have to guess what is in the making. How you show those figures is covered under dashboard, and which ones you follow under KPI.

Many CRM programs have workflows: rules that create follow-up actions automatically, such as a task to call when a quote has not been answered after a few days. They usually run as a SaaS service in the browser, so you do not have to install anything.

A CRM is not the same as an ERP. The CRM is about the relationship with the customer before and around the sale. The ERP is about administration, invoicing and stock. Both can exist side by side, but they are not automatically connected. Which data you keep where, you therefore agree in advance.

Would you like to know what a CRM could mean for your company? Then read CRM software for SMEs. At Operion we set up Zoho CRM and Bigin as a project, with a fixed scope and an estimate in advance.