Sales Force Marketing - Salesforce.com CRM:
What is CRM Software? A Beginners Guide

CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management and is a strategy for managing a company's interactions with their existing customers and prospects. CRM Software allows for this process to be recorded so that all forms of contact with a customer or potential customer are logged on a central system. By doing this all staff at a business can see a full contact history including any phone calls, emails, letters, quotes, service/helpdesk calls and financial details required to contact the person in question with all the relevant information required.

Most CRM systems have the same basic functionality which allows for company details to be entered along with details of all of the contacts at that company. In some case each company can be listed as a branch of a larger organisation with each company and contact having their own unique contact records and history details. Against each person the details of any interaction can be logged so that future calls/letters to that person can be referenced if required.

CRM systems also allow for custom data to be stored against each record that shows any key information about the company such as turnover, number staff or industry which is normally used for marketing and sales purposes to target specific types of customers.

Some CRM Systems are part of, or integrate to, larger systems that include accounts systems and service systems. This allows for all financial information to be made available to the relevant people - for example if a customer is on stop with accounts for not paying their bills the sales team needs to know not to sell more to them or offer discounts! Service data is also important for this same reason so any recent problems can be addressed before further sales pitches are made.

Of course all of the information in the system can be reported on and used for marketing purposes. A CRM system also automates this process by allowing data to be mail merged or emailed and call lists can be created for telemarketing teams. When leads are generated they can be logged against the correct company and contact and monitored all the way through a sale. This allows businesses to see how successful (or unsuccessful) each of their marketing activities are by seeing how many leads were generated and what happened to each lead.
The same style of reporting could be carried out based on sales person, territory or type of enquiry (i.e. a specific product or service).

Overall, a CRM system gives a business a better overview of their relationship with all of their customers which should help them to tailor their marketing activities, manage existing customer relationships and therefore improve retention rate and upsell products.

What are the alternatives?

In reality many companies use nothing. They leave the management of their customers in the hands of their sales or support teams but often the communication between the two causes problems. The contact with customers could be recorded on a spreadsheet but this obviously has many limitations and when managing multiple contacts and branches is unworkable for most companies.

Some accounts systems and service systems come with small CRM packages built in but these are often very limited and are commonly referred to as 'Contact Management Systems' as they simply allow for the contact and customer details to be recorded along with a basis notes field for recording contact. This suits many small businesses who do not have lots of customers or multiple sales people but as soon as they grow they often need a more centrally managed system that gives an overview of activities and can be viewed by multiple staff in different customer facing roles.

Source: Phil Denham link


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