CRM System: A Complete Guide to CRM Software

Originally published January 08, 2025, updated January 09, 2025

What is a CRM? Discover the definition, features, and why you need it for business success.

Imagine a tool that stores every bit of information about your leads, customers, or partners, tracks every interaction and communication with them, keeps your team organized and helps them close more deals. That’s CRM software! But what is CRM exactly and how can it transform your business? Let’s find it out together in the article below.

What is a CRM?

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a piece of software that lets businesses collect, store, and manage their lead and customer data to build and nurture relationships with them. Think of it as a super-organized hub where all your customer data and management processes live.

Cloud-based vs. on-premise CRM software, compared

There are many different factors that can be used to classify CRM tools. The most common is the location of the system's servers.

Cloud-based CRM (also known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) CRM platform, online CRM, and Web CRM) is a CRM tool where the application and data are all hosted remotely, on the CRM vendor’s own servers. Users can access the system from anywhere in the world via the internet.

On-premise CRM system is a solution that companies build in-house for their own usage. In this case, both the data and the CRM program itself are located on the company’s own servers and can only be accessed on the spot.

Today, businesses already know what is CRM software, and the popularity of cloud-based CRM is growing rapidly: the percentage of cloud-based users was just 12% in 2008, then jumped to 62% in 2018 and has accelerated to 87% these days.

Now that you know the answer to ‘What are CRM platforms?’, let’s answer another question, which is, ‘What does a CRM software do?’

Why CRM software is important for business growth in the long run

Some companies still rely on spreadsheets and manual processes. The limitations of these methods become obvious as a business scales. Why? Because without a clear view of your business data, reliable forecasting, and automated workflows, scaling becomes much harder. And as your team expands, the inefficiencies of manual processes become more evident. Just think of how many hours your team will have to spend on filling in customer records manually once your number of leads grows.

CRM tool optimizes your sales processes

What is CRM system if not a tool that ensures consistency in your sales process? Your sales team lacks a standardized approach to managing leads and closing deals without a CRM. This inconsistency hurts productivity and makes it difficult to forecast revenue, track the stages of the consumer decision making process, and evaluate the effectiveness of your sales strategies.

The use of CRM software in sales helps you build flexible sales pipelines, enabling your team to monitor deal progress at every stage and prioritize high-value leads effectively. Meanwhile, automated notifications and reminders keep your team on track — from now on, no missed follow-ups or delayed responses. Additionally, CRM software automates repetitive tasks like data entry and activity logging, which can save your team up to 5-10 hours per week on administrative tasks.

Automates your routine tasks aka saves time and money

Why use a CRM? To automate tasks that, honestly, might sound boring to your sales team or come with a high risk of human error that would cost your business time and money in the long run.

According to a study by Time Management Sales, salespeople spend just 37% of their time actually selling. The majority of their day — the other 67% — is wasted on repetitive, no-brainer administrative tasks such as manual data entry. These tasks are important, however they don’t contribute to the bottom line at all.

Modern CRM systems can automatically:

• Capture leads
• “Warm them up” with cold outreach
• Move them down the sales funnel based on certain criteria
• Assign them to managers
• Create tasks
• Send notifications

Improves your customer communication and management

Tracking a customer's history becomes a Herculean task without a CRM. The lack of information can lead to repeated questions and a poor customer experience. And no business wants frustrated customers, right?

What is the purpose of CRM in customer service? A CRM tool stores every customer interaction's details in the database, and the rep talking to the customer can access it during the call. By knowing their particular case's intricacies, they can offer a better solution and do it promptly.

CRM software helps your customer support reps to react to requests quickly. For instance, with NetHunt CRM, you can set up automated notifications and task assignation on a round-robin basis so that there’s no stalling, and the process kicks off immediately.

Helps you track sales team performance with reporting and analytics

Try measuring your sales team’s performance without a CRM. You won't know who's meeting their targets or how quickly leads are being converted. But one of the best features of CRM is real-time reporting and analytics that help you track performance, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your sales strategy.

CRM software shows the most effective customer acquisition channels

CRM offers built-in dashboards and reporting tools to help you analyze which channels generate the highest-quality leads and conversions. You can:

• Track the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns (clicks, opens, etc.)
• Tag and categorize leads based on their acquisition source, such as social media, email campaigns, etc. If you need to track unique acquisition metrics, CRM platforms like NetHunt allow you to do that with ultra-customizable fields.
• Use CRM’s integration with Google Analytics, social media, email marketing platforms, and other tools to access the lead data and use it further for smart report generation.

CRM improves team collaboration

CRM is the only source of truth for your team that brings everyone onto the same page with real-time access to customer data. CRM features like shared activity logs and automated task assignment + automatic deal change notifications help teams collaborate and stay on top of every deal by ensuring everyone knows who is responsible for what and when. Plus, integrations with tools like Slack make communication effortless.

Key features of a CRM system

Not all CRMs offer the same features, and some have unique tools for specific industries. For example, real estate CRMs often include property landing page builders and search tools. So, the answer to ‘What is CRM platform?’ might sound a little bit different depending on the industry which a company represents… 🤔

Without further ado, let’s discuss the key features in detail.

Contact management

The capability to effectively manage your customer database is at the core of every CRM system. A decent CRM, such as NetHunt CRM, provides features such as duplicate prevention, automatic data enrichment, and an in-depth overview of interaction history. This guarantees that your client database is clean and well-organized.  

The customer card that’s created contains all the necessary information about your prospects or clients, such as their name, job title, contact information, and any other bit of information you deemed necessary to collect.

Lead management

What’s a CRM system without lead management functionality? A Rolodex from the 1960s 😏

Any CRM system must come with an ability to manage leads. Powerful integrations allow you to capture leads, custom filters and tags allow for better segmentation and qualification, and the workflow functionality allows for automated lead nurturing processes.

For instance, NetHunt CRM allows you to capture leads from various sources like website forms, messengers, social media, and LinkedIn. Plus, you can communicate with all those leads and manage your LinkedIn inbox right within the CRM.

Email marketing functionality

A good CRM system doesn’t leave you asking ‘How to use CRM for email marketing?’ Because a good CRM offers BUILT-IN email marketing features, such as:

• Creating and saving email templates
• Launching email campaigns
• Tracking key metrics like open and click-through rates
• Personalising emails with macros

This functionality allows you to personalize your campaigns and measure their impact directly. You won’t ever have to leave your CRM suite and gather data from other email marketing tools to add it to your CRM!

With NetHunt CRM, you can nurture leads with personalized email campaigns, set follow-up campaigns to previous ones, and track the campaign performance (opens, clicks, unsubscribes, etc.).

Pipeline Management

With a CRM, you can visualize your sales pipelines and give them a whole new, and easier to operate look. With CRM’s pipeline management functionality, you have a much clearer picture of the stages of your pipeline, from “new” up to “won”, as well as a visual representation of what the changes in your pipeline have been lately.

Sales Automation

Repetitive, no-brainer tasks suck; we can all agree on that. A great CRM offers a solution to that problem. For example, with NetHunt CRM, you can automate tasks like lead distribution, follow-ups, cold emails, and lead stage changes, freeing up your sales team's time to focus on more strategic activities.

Reporting and Analytics

This feature completely aligns with the core CRM purpose to provide clarity into your business processes. Allowing you to track metrics such as conversion rates, sales forecasts, team performance towards their goals and more. You can also check the activity of your team and have a much more detailed overview of your customer funnel, allowing you to spot bottlenecks from a mile away.

Collaborative Functionality

A CRM system also serves as a collaborative platform, bridging the gap between the departments in your business. Features like task assignments, mentions, and shared databases ensure everyone is on the same page.

Tag colleagues when you need their help, leave comments for your team, and assign tasks associated with customers without going into details.

Who can benefit from CRM usage?

In the past, there was a myth that a CRM system was for salespeople only. Today’s CRM software uses vary, and every team within the organization can have a CRM to optimize their processes, improve collaboration, and have a unified view on data. Let us tell you how to use a CRM in all your company’s departments 😉

CRM software for sales teams

The sales team uses CRM to build, manage and visualize sales pipelines. They also use it to qualify leads, analyse past sales performance, and forecast future deals. A CRM can also help create reports, personalize offerings, and convert leads into paying customers faster.

Sales teams can also automate routine tasks that lead to higher conversion rates, such as:

• Lead distribution
• Lead nurturing
• Follow ups
• And more!

CRM for marketing teams

What is a CRM software for marketing teams? It’s a CRM software that helps marketing teams segment the company’s audience better and run more successful personalized campaigns. This is particularly true for CRM for marketing agencies, where tailored outreach is paramount.

On top of that, data from the CRM tool allows marketers to better grasp their ideal customer profile (ICP) and map their customer journey with more details. Plus, with reporting and analytics, the marketing teams can analyse the effectiveness of customer acquisition channels (lead volume and growth, lead quality, conversion rate, etc.).

But CRM uses don’t stop here as the tool also helps in figuring out the optimal number of touchpoints and maximizing the impact each of them has on the company’s customers.

As a result, businesses increase the number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and nurture them more effectively.

CRM system for customer support teams

Customer support can also find value in learning how to use CRM software and making it a part of their daily operations. CRM software allows support agents to respond more quickly and accurately to customer inquiries, ensuring that no details are overlooked.

With a CRM system, agents can access customer history, identify recurring problems, and offer personalized solutions, which improves the overall customer experience. Additionally, it helps in tracking the resolution of support cases, enabling the team to be more efficient and proactive in addressing customer needs. This results in higher customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty.

CRM software for managers

The C-Suite and business owners can use CRM data to make more informed decisions. Having reliable, up-to-date, and easy-to-interpret data at hand is crucial in the day-to-day to leading their departments or running of a business. The CRM's reporting functionality allows managers to track performance metrics, identify sales trends, allocate resources effectively, and make data-driven decisions.

With CRM data, you can track your team's activities in real time and review completed tasks to spot what drives sales and what slows them down. Use these insights to coach, reward, and refine your team's performance.

What types of businesses need CRM software?

The benefits of CRM implementation now extend to businesses of all sizes. Modern CRMs are highly customizable, serving solopreneurs, startups, and enterprises alike, with features tailored to specific needs.

NetHunt CRM, for example, works really well for these industries:

👉 Real estate agencies

👉 Transaction management

👉 Professional services

👉 SaaS and tech businesses

👉 Digital marketing agencies

👉 Startups

and more..

As for the size of your business… Do small businesses really need CRM?

Honestly, all businesses can reap benefits of using CRM software. However, everything depends on the features you choose for your CRM.

How much does a CRM cost?

In the past, when the CRM software market wasn’t so competitive (well, not everyone even knew what is CRM systems), such a solution was an expensive tool, especially if you were looking for the best Google CRM. Today, as the market grows and more vendors enter it offering all kinds of generic and specialized systems, customer relationship management becomes significantly more accessible.

As a rule of thumb, CRM pricing depends on the features the system offers. The more features and extra modules the tool offers, the more expensive it gets.

There are also different subscription-based pricing models for CRMs (please keep in mind that businesses often offer mixed models):

• Flat-rate pricing: a single product and a fixed set of CRM features at a fixed price per month regardless of the number of users.
• Tiered pricing: different packages at various price points, with each package providing a set of features. Customers choose the package based on their needs and scale, paying more for higher tiers with more advanced features.
• Per-added-module pricing: a base rate for the standard CRM; functionality can be expanded upon request for a higher price. Per-user pricing: a fixed price for every user of the CRM. Currently, it’s the most widespread pricing model in the CRM software market.

When should you implement a CRM system

Benefits of CRM implementation are multiple. Just to be clear, we’re talking about a tool that will:

• Boost your sales
• Help you keep your database organized and clean
• Foster collaboration
• Provide more insightful data
• Automate routine processes
• Improve customer relationships

and many other benefits to count…

Of course, the best time to implement and learn how to use a CRM is yesterday. The other best option — right after reading this article. Think about it.

Why wouldn’t you do a service to every employee of the business (yourself included) by giving them an environment that allows them to focus more on mastering their tasks and responsibilities than administrative work?

On top of that, implementing a CRM is also a service to every one of your customers. Thanks to access to a cleaner, better organized, and more complete database, your employees will be able to provide their customers with stellar customer service.

How to get started with a CRM system

Once you make the decision to commit to a CRM software and learn how CRM system works eventually, you’ll need to choose the right suite for your needs.

Now you know everything about CRM system, but convincing a team to change anything about the way they normally do things is a difficult process if not done right. Here is a CRM implementation checklist to follow:

• Have your CRM vendor onboard your employees and show them what is CRM software and how to use it. Then, have a CRM training for every new employee who joins the company.
• Migrate all the data from your previous data management system to the CRM.
• Assign an in-house CRM manager that would help people with CRM-related problems and requests.
• Educate teams of the benefits of up-to-date CRM and prompt them to use it.
• Automate as many of your business processes as possible using the CRM.
• Regularly assess the success of your CRM implementation and adjust your strategy for better results.

Final thoughts or why you should choose NetHunt CRM as your ultimate CRM software

In the crowded CRM landscape, our solution, NetHunt CRM, stands out for its unique blend of features, security, and customer-centric approach. Here's why you should check it out:

• NetHunt CRM is integrated with Gmail and other Google Workspace tools giving you access to a CRM from your inbox.
• The system is very flexible and helps you tailor it to your specific business processes.
• You can eliminate repetitive tasks with NetHunt’s features like webforms, drip campaigns, and automated workflows.
• You can manage all your leads in one place. NetHunt integrates with LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and more platforms.
• Our pricing plans are very flexible.
• NetHunt CRM lets you supercharge your email campaigns with tracking and automation features directly from your inbox.

When life gives you lemons — make lemonade. When NetHunt CRM gives you a great feature list at a very friendly price — try it!

FAQs

Table of Contents