CRM: What is it and what is it not?

You’d be forgiven for being a little confused. Many other business decision-makers are left scratching their heads when they’re pressured to choose between different sales technologies. But we’re here to help clear this up for you.

Understanding CRM vs SFA: How Customer Relationship Management Boosts Sales

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process that businesses use to manage interactions with customers through data analysis. CRM systems compile information from a variety of communication channels, including websites, phone calls, email, live chat, marketing materials, and social media. The primary goal of CRM software is to help companies understand their target audience, improve customer engagement, increase sales, and boost customer retention.

What is CRM Software?

Think of CRM as a digital Rolodex for your business. It stores critical customer data, helps marketing teams generate leads, track the customer journey, and run targeted campaigns. CRM platforms allow businesses to segment customers based on relevant criteria, manage prospects in the sales funnel, and follow up until leads become paying customers.

It’s important to note that CRM is different from Marketing Automation (MA). While CRM focuses on customer profiles and engagement tracking, marketing automation platforms manage and automate communications, such as mass emails, social media posts, website visits, and the measurement of lead generation and conversion.

The Importance of CRM Integration

Sales, marketing, and finance teams often use different software platforms, each with unique customer touchpoints. Without proper integration, these systems can cause order errors, billing mistakes, late deliveries, and excessive product returns. A robust CRM platform integrates seamlessly with other business systems, eliminating these issues.

When combined with a real-time field sales automation (SFA) platform, CRM ensures all customer interactions, including face-to-face meetings with outside sales teams, are captured accurately. This provides a full view of customer activity and financial account status, giving your business actionable, up-to-date data.

CRM vs Sales Force Automation (SFA)

While often confused, CRM and Sales Force Automation (SFA) serve different purposes:

• CRM Software. Focuses on customer profiles, office-based account management, and remote communications. It creates a single view of all customer interactions across sales, marketing, and support, with the goal of increasing customer retention.

• SFA Software / Field Sales Automation. Tracks the entire sales process, monitors sales staff activities, assigns tasks, and analyzes performance against goals. SFA helps businesses manage inquiries, orders, invoicing, and payments in real-time, streamlining the field sales process.

By combining CRM and SFA platforms, businesses can ensure all customer data is accurate. They can ensure interactions are logged in real-time. And sales teams are empowered to make smarter decisions, improve customer relationships, and drive revenue growth.

Click here to read a more detailed description of the differences between CRM and Sales Force Automation tools.

You can adopt new sales technology easily. To learn more, download Skynamo’s Beginner’s Guide for Moving to Sales Technology to understand how technology can help you and your business, or get in touch with Skynamo, the easy-to-use Field Sales app for manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors.