An acronym for Customer Relationship Management, CRM is a term that was initially defined and designed to improve customer service. Today, though, it relates to an entire business strategy. CRM system acts as a single repository to bring your sales, marketing, and customer support activities together, and streamline your process, policy, and people in one platform.

If getting quality leads is one thing, tracking and managing them to deal closure is another. CRM offers you everything that you need to know about your leads to convert them into happy, paying customers. With lead scoring and automated lead assignment, you can assign leads based on a variety of parameters and know which leads have the highest chance of moving down the pipeline.

Contact management features in CRM help you organize your business contacts in one place. You’ll know when and why you contacted a customer the last time, the best time to reach them, mentions from social media interactions, and analytics to reach customers through email and other forms of communication.

A deal once lost is lost forever. The deal management features in CRM gives you the complete picture of your current and future deals, and lets you know what went wrong with your past unsuccessful ones. CRM allows you to segment deals based on their current stage in the pipeline and can tell you the probability of winning any deal.

Email management is a core function to any business and an online CRM solution lets you take complete control of it. Any email client that you use can be integrated with your customer relationship management tool, which means you save time switching between tabs to get work done. Email management system inside a CRM lets you prioritize emails, analyze the response to every email, and ensures you have thorough follow-ups with your receivers.

As a CRM implementor for your business, you want your sales team to spend more time selling and less time doing other administrative work. Here’s where automating your sales process will help. Sales automation will help you replace your current mundane tasks with intelligent workflows and macros. Leads will also flow through your pipeline more easily with automatic assignment of leads to the right sales reps.

An analytics-driven business culture can go a long way in transforming your organization’s decision-making style from “gut feeling” to “data-driven.” CRM software offers businesses the necessary intelligence to process data from various sources and churn out valuable insights to guide them with data. From basic charts to advanced analytics insights, such as spotting anomalies in your business, an inbuilt analytics engine inside CRM can help enterprises gain a crucial competitive advantage.

Often companies find themselves wasting their marketing budget due to poor planning and the failure to identify the real target audience for their brand. A disconnect between sales and marketing teams can hamper these efforts. With a marketing automation solution inside CRM, you can generate new leads, execute targeted email marketing campaigns, compare ad spending to sales revenue, and ultimately get the maximum ROI on your marketing spend.

There is never a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to implementing a CRM for your business. If there is any business software solution on the market that can be truly customized to the way your business works, it has to be a CRM system. You can customize your CRM with custom functions, buttons, modules, fields, and layouts, or even build a CRM entirely from scratch with offerings unique to your business vertical.

At a time when global mobile usage has overtaken desktops, it is vital that your CRM system allows your workforce to go completely mobile. Mobile CRM helps sales reps close more deals on the go. It allows managers to add and update data when they shuttle between multiple business appointments, and even when they are offline. Trade shows, business meetings, networking events, both in flight and on the road, a mobile CRM helps you be business-ready no matter where your business takes you.