What is CRM?

CRM, meaning customer relationship management, refers to strategies that businesses use to manage customer interactions and data. With a CRM system like Pipedrive, you can organize, manage, track and improve the customer experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Our CRM platform helps you automate communications, simplify processes and build stronger customer relationships.

What is CRM software?

CRM software is a tool that enables you to manage customer data and nurture customer relationships.

Each CRM platform is different, but here are some practical CRM features to look for:

Lead management: Capture lead data from various sources, assign lead quality scores and match new leads with the right sales rep.

Pipeline management: Map your sales pipeline with a CRM to better understand how customers move through the buying journey and to encourage conversion.

Workflow and marketing automation: Automate repetitive tasks like prospecting, lead qualification and customer communications to simplify your workflow and provide potential customers with a personalized experience.

Reporting and forecasting: Use dashboards, CRM analysis and reporting tools to identify customer trends and assess sales performance.

That’s a simple CRM definition, but who should use CRM and what are the benefits?

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Who should use CRM?

A CRM system helps you manage all customer data in one database, improve sales management and track sales.

Here’s how those benefits work on a daily basis:

Manage CRM data in one database: A central hub for contact management makes it quicker and easier for salespeople to access valuable customer information.
Improve sales management: The data stored in a CRM tells you who your customers are, how they behave and what they want. This information helps you improve sales decisions and marketing efforts.
Track sales and financial performance: A CRM platform provides a rundown of your sales, revenue and financial performance. This helps you see how well you’re doing and pinpoint areas of the sales process that need improvement.

Learn more about the benefits of CRM

Should you consider an AI-powered CRM?

Enhance your processes and boost productivity with a CRM that has AI features.

An AI-powered sales assistant can analyze your team’s performance and actions, making recommendations to help you close deals and calculate their value.

AI agents can work alongside you every step of the way, completing tasks and supporting your workflow.

There are plenty of other ways AI can improve your CRM, such as writing emails and creating custom reports based on your prompts.

Say hello to Pipedrive AI

Boost your sales success with our AI-powered features. Phase out manual processes, streamline communication and make data-driven decisions for smarter, faster sales.

How users benefit from Pipedrive’s CRM

Increase deals in your pipeline by
93%

Reduce average deal closing time by
46%

Increase average deal value by
21%

Choosing the right CRM for you

Most CRM features benefit businesses in any industry – including banking, retail and architecture, to name a few – but decision-makers should consider their use case before selecting a CRM. Here are some features to look out for in different industries and sectors.

CRM for B2B and B2C

B2B businesses often have longer sales cycles and sell higher-value products, so it’s vital that they have access to a CRM that visualizes the pipeline so they can stay up-to-date with every touchpoint and easily track contact activity.

Read more about B2B CRM.

Meanwhile, B2C businesses may be managing a larger volume of customer interactions, so they need a CRM that enables them to manage deals and make data-backed decisions quickly.

Read more about B2C CRM.

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Who benefits from using a CRM platform?

CRM software is useful across a range of industries, from SaaS and real estate to manufacturing and marketing. A CRM platform will benefit any large or small business that wants to improve customer satisfaction, increase efficiency and boost sales.

Within an organization, teams like sales, marketing, customer support, finance and operations can profit from using a CRM to perform the following activities:

Marketing attracts leads and passes them to sales, but keeping track of opportunities and follow-up activities is only possible with a robust, organized system.

A good CRM platform helps you track all sales activities before and after conversion.

Score every lead and follow them in real time along the sales pipeline to recognize opportunities for improvement, spot winning patterns and refine your sales funnel.
Addressing your target audience’s challenges helps you build strong, profitable relationships.

A CRM will help you address specific pain points, build trust and keep the same customers coming back.

Use your CRM to get to know leads, prospects and customers via:
- Previous conversations
- Buying journeys
- Purchase histories
- Website activity
- Marketing campaign responses
With these insights, you can also offer better support to customers and improve retention.
Sales and marketing share many common goals. The better aligned they are, the better your business will perform.

According to Pipedrive’s State of Sales and Marketing 2021/2022 report, companies with well-integrated sales and marketing departments were twice as likely as companies with poor revenue team integration to exceed their annual revenue targets.

A CRM is a central knowledge hub for sales, marketing and other customer-focused functions. It enables teams to share valuable insights and make more informed decisions at all stages of the customer lifecycle.
Salespeople and marketers often spend valuable hours on mundane admin tasks. A good CRM can process some or all of this repetitive work with automations, letting your team members spend time nurturing leads and serving customers.

Pipedrive lets you automate almost any step of your sales process and even some marketing tasks.
- Trigger personalized emails to go out whenever a new deal enters the pipeline
- Schedule follow-up tasks when deals reach certain stages
- Score leads so reps know who to contact for the best outcomes
Research shows that automation directly improves business and individual performance. Our State of Sales and Marketing 2021/2022 report revealed that people who automate tasks are 16% more likely to hit their targets.

How Pipedrive can help any business

When choosing the right CRM, consider the size of your business and where you are in your journey. The best CRMs, like Pipedrive, grow with you.

CRM for startups

Startup CRMs enable new businesses to focus on growth, enabling you to oversee performance in a single platform so you can identify opportunities to grow your business. Pipedrive helps you keep your eyes on the prize so you meet your goals.

The sales CRM is a feature-rich yet easy-to-use tool. Pipedrive keeps you on track with your pipeline management activities, monitors important customer data and improves your business processes.

Read our guide to CRM for startups.

How Pipedrive’s CRM helped Tiffany Largie grow her business to $2.5 million

Tiffany Largie, a successful entrepreneur, business speaker and consultant, found her sales team leaving money on the table as they struggled to keep up with data management.

Pipedrive’s simple CRM solution helped her team instantly begin tracking customer data in real time. The CRM software enabled sales reps to manage multiple revenue streams simultaneously, automating the sales process to help them close deals faster.

“We were managing between 150–300 outreaches a day. With Pipedrive, we could handle that data in real time in a way that didn’t require us to perform a lot of data entry.”

Read the full case study

Tiffany Largie Case Study

The advantages of using a cloud-based vs. an on-premise CRM platform

Unlike an on-site CRM (which lives on your company’s server), a cloud-based CRM is accessible online. Here are a few benefits of using an online CRM vs. an on-site solution:

Cloud-based CRM	On-premise CRM
Work from anywhere: All you need are your login details and a solid internet connection	Access is limited to set devices and locations
Access to real-time data means all employees work from the most up-to-date files	Manual updates can lead to employees working from out-of-date files
Quick and easy installation: The software and all its features are online and ready to use immediately	A complex structure needs expertise and time to install locally
Vendor support and maintenance make for a cost-effective solution	Costs add up with the internal staff required to provide support and maintenance
Easy to scale with added resources and various pricing plans as your business grows	Changes to the size or capacity of the platform require new purchases or additional software and take time to install

How to manage and improve customer relationships with CRM

A CRM platform can help you maintain better relationships with your customers by enabling you to:

Visualize the customer journey. A CRM system tells you how new customers came into contact with your brand. For example, via your social media page, website or sales email.
These touchpoints give you a clear picture of how customers move through the buying journey and what you can do to make it easier for them and encourage them to buy.
Identify trends in customer behavior. A CRM makes it easy to spot patterns in customer behavior. You’ll better understand buyer behavior and how to meet their needs.
Create a personalized customer experience. A CRM allows you to send personalized communications to customers. As a result, they enjoy their experience with your business and are more likely to keep moving along the sales cycle to make a purchase.

With the right CRM, you can also customize your own experience when using the tool. Pipedrive CRM’s customizable features include custom fields, tailored dashboards and completely adaptable pipelines to suit your needs.

How much CRM software costs

Most CRM providers offer different plans and payment options to suit businesses in different industries, sizes and regions.

Most entry-level plans cost between ten to thirty dollars, while higher-tier plans can cost anywhere between fifty and five thousand.

Some providers offer a free plan with limited features, but it’s best to fully assess your business’s requirements before selecting an option that might only be good for your budget.

Pipedrive offers an Essential plan for new and one-person businesses, as well as more expensive plans, making it perfect for companies looking to grow and get a return on their investment.

Pipedrive is available in three currencies: US dollar, Euro and British pound sterling.

Find out more on our CRM pricing page.

Examples of customer relationship management software

What key CRM features should I look for

On a list of customer relationship management software options, you’ll find solutions tailored to different business needs which can be categorized into these types:

Operational CRM streamlines customer interactions and processes with sales automation and service management.
Analytical CRM emphasizes data analysis to understand customer behavior and inform strategy.
Collaborative CRM enhances communication across teams and integrates tools to improve customer relationships.

Many examples of CRM software, like Pipedrive, do all three.

When choosing a solution, consider its customer relationship management software features. Contact and lead management, workflow automation, reporting, analytics and multi-channel communication support are key CRM features to look out for.

Used by over 100,000 companies in 179 countries

In the forecast view, we look at what deals are due to close this month, next month just to make sure everyone is really honest about what they should be working on.

Carolyn PearsonFounder, Maiden Voyage

One of the favorite features within Pipedrive is the email integration. It pulls all of the clients details in, so that we don’t have to think about it.

Erin and DrewFounders, Pro Arts

As a business owner, my favorite feature in Pipedrive is the statistics and being able to look at the dashboard and use those metrics to help each individual on the team.

Lisa CoyleCEO, 360 Payments

Over 500+ integrations

Expand the capabilities of Pipedrive with hundreds of apps and integrations

See all apps and extensions

The importance of CRM security

The best CRMs scale with your business, can be customized to your needs and have plenty of features and integrations. They also need to offer strong security.

Pipedrive complies with GDPR and adheres to SOC 2, SOC 3, the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, ISO/IEC 27001:2013 and its extension ISO 27701:2019.

Learn more about Pipedrive’s privacy and security.

CRM FAQs

CRM is an initialism for customer relationship management. So, what does customer relationship management mean? It describes the process of managing customer data and improving customer interactions to increase sales.

In business, CRMs help organizations build customer relationships and streamline business processes. As a result, they can increase sales, improve customer service and increase profitability.

CRMs are important in many businesses, as these tools act as the main resource for understanding customer relationships, sales metrics and revenue growth opportunities.
The main purpose of CRM is to provide businesses with the tools and techniques to manage relationships with leads and customers.

Customer relationship management is important because it provides businesses with the processes and tools to drive revenue through the sales and marketing funnels.

A customer relationship management system or solution, meanwhile, provides users with the features they need to manage those relationships and the data effectively. There are both on-premises and cloud-based CRM systems.

However, to get the most out of the software, you need to know how to use customer relationship management, which is why we offer onboarding to Pipedrive users. So, if you’re wondering how to use CRM software as effectively as possible, see if the tool you’ve chosen has onboarding support or video tutorials to help you get started. It’s also worth paying attention to the latest feature updates and checking the knowledge base for guides.

A good CRM solution will help users quickly process data and identify opportunities so they can drive revenue for their businesses.
Customer relationship management strategies focus on defining a clear, standardized process that businesses can use to engage and convert leads, prospects and customers. It’s also important to build a pipeline so that you can help navigate new leads through to becoming customers and beyond.

Once the process and pipeline have been defined, they can then be customized to suit each individual use case.

Some common CRM strategies include building relationships, personalizing communication across different channels and developing support and loyalty programs to nurture customers.
While CRM focuses on leads, customers and revenue contacts, ERP (enterprise resource planning) helps you manage internal processes to remove bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Read our guide on CRM vs. ERP for all the details.

A CDP (customer data platform) is where businesses host all their customer data, beyond what’s just in the CRM. This resource can be used by sales and marketing teams to gain a more complete view of relationships and enhance their interactions with contacts on the CRM.

See how Pipedrive works for your business