What is CRM?

A CRM centralises all customer interactions across all channels. Managing centralised data assists businesses in improving their customer experience, satisfaction, retention, and service.

CRM enables companies of all sizes to drive growth and profits.

Yes, they are still primarily intended for sales, marketing, and customer service teams. However, they now do a dizzying array of other things, such as assisting users in managing relationships between team members, vendors, partners, and collaborators.

Benefits of CRM

Enhances Customer Service
A CRM system manages all of your contacts and aggregates lead and customer data to create profiles of everyone with whom you interact. This gives you quick access to critical information for better understanding customer behaviour, such as purchase records and previous communications with contacts via various channels (chat, email, etc.). Customers will not have to repeat their stories to you, and you will be able to address issues with best practises and less effort, resulting in increased customer loyalty.
Sales Growth
Streamlining and improving the sales process, creating a sales pipeline, automating tasks, and analysing sales data will inevitably result in increased sales and sales productivity. A CRM system allows you to access all of your customer-facing voice, chat, and email touchpoints in one place. You'll close more deals by developing a repeatable, proven sales process and delivering the right message on the right channel at the right time.
Increase Customer Retention
Customer retention and churn rates are critical determinants of a company's success; customer churn is a major impediment to business growth. CRM tools such as sentiment analysis, automated ticketing, and customer support and customer service automation can improve retention significantly by allowing human agents to defuse problems. Analytics tools that look at the customer life cycle can show you when and why churn occurs, allowing you to identify and address pain points.
Better Analytics
Analytical CRM tools make your data more accessible, understandable, and relevant to your business requirements. All of your sales, finance, and marketing data flows into CRM to become visible metrics, with data warehousing and data mining to make sense of it all. The net result is increased customer acquisition, retention, and improved data management.
Greater Efficiency
Having all of your major day-to-day business functions in one place improves workflow, team member collaboration, and project management. Task automation eliminates menial, repetitive work, freeing up time for the cognitive tasks that humans excel at. Dashboards and analytics will assist you in gaining insights into your work and optimising various business processes.
Improved knowledge sharing
Miscommunication and a lack of information transfer are both significant time wasters. You lose a lot of hours per week when people spend time self-learning to do things that other team members already know how to do, or when they work on redundant tasks. Collaborative CRM tools can help you streamline your teamwork by allowing you to create a knowledge base, establish best practise workflows, and enable frictionless communication among team members.
Greater Transparency
A CRM system enables you to increase transparency in your organisation by assigning tasks, displaying work, and clearly defining who is who and who is doing what. If sales are your primary concern, you can use performance tracking for individual sales agents. A CRM platform provides visibility into your business processes for everyone in your organisation, fostering greater mutual understanding and collaboration.

How CRM Works

CRMs collect information from email, voice calls, and other channels to help you acquire new customers and retain existing ones. They provide a centralised location for organising your workflows and business processes, allowing you to collaborate, close more deals, and get more done.

A CRM system's main features are marketing and sales force automation, contact and project management.

CRM should, in practise, work with the way your business operates. There are many different types of good CRM available, and there is no one-size-fits-all/right CRM option. However, there is a CRM technology that is specifically tailored to each company's unique business strategy.

CRM software gathers all customer data into one place and allows businesses to drive growth and profits. Among other things, it makes it easier for companies to:

  • Improve efficiency – Having all your business data in one place makes for better workflow, easier team collaboration, and better project management.
  • Have more transparency – Everyone in your organization gain visibility on your business processes, fostering more clarity, and better teamwork.
  • Retain customers – By relying on a single source of truth, everyone can work with greater confidence, assuring better customer relationships in the long run.
  • Increase sales – Streamlining the sales process, building a pipeline, automating tasks, and analyzing your sales data will lead to increased sales and sales productivity.

Who Needs CRM?

The quick answer? CRM systems can benefit anyone who owns a business.

The longer answer is that anyone working in sales, marketing, service, support, or running a startup, managing a community group, non-profit, or volunteer organisation, as well as editorial teams, ad agencies, and art projects or productions, can benefit.

A CRM system is used by businesses of all sizes, from solo freelance operations and home-run e-commerce to small businesses, mid-size businesses, and large enterprise-level corporations. Better organisation, centralised task management, and modern AI and automation tools that make work faster and better with less time and effort can benefit everyone.


Companies are becoming more remote-distributed in general, and teams are becoming more flexible from project to project. It makes sense to invest in a tool that neatly organises all of your work processes and allows you to access all of your tasks and workflow processes on-the-fly through cloud services.


Meanwhile, there’s no doubt that online business competition will continue to heat up. CRM systems used wisely can give your company an advantage. Automation enables your company to punch above its weight by eliminating repetitive tasks, allowing the human component of your business to focus on its strengths.


The CRM market grew 15.6% in 2018 as SMBs continued to adopt these tools and vendors frantically continued to streamline and deliver products that fit modern work.

HubSpot CRM

Hubspot's CRM (free for up to two users) incorporates analytics and reporting metrics into its dashboards. Meanwhile, HubSpot's all-in-one Marketing Hub significantly enhances these features with advanced marketing analytics.

HubSpot Marketing Hub is intended to assist in the improvement of all aspects of the marketing funnel, from lead acquisition to deal closure. The marketing analytics dashboard finds and interprets key metrics and generates reports by trawling data from third-party databases and your CRM.

MailChimp CRM

Mailchimp is an industry leader in email databasing and automated blast emailing. Their simple design tools allow you to create email marketing campaigns and tailor messages to reach people across multiple email channels.

Mailchimp offers a plethora of automation features, including the ability to set up auto-emails triggered by events such as new sign-ups, purchases, or abandoned cart reminders.

In terms of integrations, Mailchimp provides a large number of ready-to-merge services and is easily paired with CRMs such as Salesforce, Insightly, and many others.

They also make real-life postcards (which Customer.io does as well!).