Customer relationship management is a key tool and strategy for any business that wants to become more organized and see long-term success. As a business, one of your goals is to ensure that you have great relationships with your customers to retain them. What better way to do this than with a great customer relationship management system in place! With it, you can track the various channels of communication between you and your customers. That is just the beginning, though, as there are many other things you can do with customer relationship management.

What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is just a combination of your company’s practices, leads, and software that you use to monitor the interactions between you and your customers. This tracking system goes all the way through the customer’s sales cycle. This is beneficial for businesses that are looking to provide a better experience to their customers.

Why is CRM Important To Your Business?

One of the most important aspects of CRM is the insight it gives to your business. It helps give you an insight into what your customers are doing and who they are. You can use this knowledge to change or improve your current business operations to make them more appealing to those customers. 

Another reason that CRM is important to your business is that it can help your business become more efficient. More specifically, it can help your business automate certain tasks that might have taken so much of your time before. These tasks include emails, contact management, and customer support. With CRM software automating those tasks, you now have more time to address any other needs your business has. 

CRM can also help your business during times of growth. Maybe you used to keep track of all of your clients in a spreadsheet, but now you have noticed that your client number has grown much faster than expected. Now it seems almost impossible to keep track of them as well as any interactions with them. This is where importing them to CRM software can help you. You now have all of the clients under one organized system, and you can even group them based on certain criteria. Now, anytime you need to send out a mass email to individuals who meet certain criteria, you can do so in just a few clicks.

Common CRM Terms

Many terms are used whenever people talk about CRM. Some of these terms might be ones you might not even need to know based on your business, of course. That is why we are only going to go over the most common CRM terms for now. Understanding these CRM terms and what they mean is helpful if you want to become more familiar with it as a whole. 

Lead

A lead is potentially going to make a purchase from your business and become a customer. Think of it like this. Say you are in the business of selling shoes online. For a couple of days now, you have noticed that someone is going through your shoe catalog and visiting your FAQs page. They eventually sign-up with their email for exclusive discounts on your shoes. This shows that they are potentially ready to purchase from your business. Leads are usually converted into contacts or deals. 

Contact

A contact is essentially an individual record that contains and stores a person’s name, address, phone number, and other related information. The best thing about having a contact property is that you have most of the important and relevant information you need from a person under one record. 

Sales Pipeline

The sales pipeline is a CRM term that you should begin to get familiar with. The reason being that the sales pipeline is one of the more commonly used tools in CRM software. It used to see how many of your leads have reached the end of their sales cycle. Best of all, this is where you keep track of where your leads are during this cycle. For example, say your sales cycle begins with leads that you have reached out to and ends with leads who have purchased on your website. Every time they move through the sales pipeline, you can determine when they moved, why they moved, and if they are potentially gonna move again. 

Campaign

A campaign is a term used to describe any marketing effort. These can include email marketing, social media marketing, ads, and even mail. With CRM software, you can automate a campaign, such as an email campaign, to send a certain email out during a scheduled period of time. 

Dashboards

The dashboard is another important CRM term. It is important because, in most CRM software, the dashboard is an overview of all key statistics regarding a website. It can include traffic, sessions, ad spend, users, and other metrics. These metrics are important to any marketing team as they can help them strategize a plan to improve these metrics to reach their business goals. 

Workflow

Whenever you hear automation in CRM, you will more than likely hear the term workflow as well. This is because a workflow is a program that automates certain tasks once certain criteria have been met. For example, you might create a workflow that activates once someone signs up for your email deals, sending them an email with a coupon for 10% off their total purchase. Workflows can help you automate processes, which in turn saves you time. 

There are many more CRM terms than the six aforementioned ones, but these are some of the most commonly used ones that you will hear about when using CRM. 

CRM is an invaluable tool for your business. Many benefits come with using CRM. From automation to better organization, a CRM has been a game-changer to many businesses, small or large. Start looking into using a CRM for your business to learn more about how it can help you!

We’re HubSpot partners and would love to help your business get set up with one of the best CRM tools out there! Get started today.