What is a CRM and why you need one?

Technology, business and new media industries are overwhelming the public with an ingent load of terms and acronyms that, sometimes, we don’t even understand. That could be the case of CRM, which would be the key topic of our blog, so we are going to dedicate this post to explain what a CRM is and what is it for.

The term CRM is the abbreviation of customer relationship management, and this particular “management” is linked to a tool or technology, designed for this type of task. As its name states, a CRM is destined to improve business relationships between a company and its clients (or potential clients).

Although a CRM can be understood as a business strategy or a process adopted by a certain company, every time we will mention here a CRM, we will understand it as a technological solution or digital tool.

What are the uses of a CRM platform?

It doesn’t matter which source you read, because you will always find underlined that a CRM solution will help a company to get new customers and collect information about them. This data collection can happen through any type of today’s broadly used channels: email, telephone, social media, etcetera. In the end, all data collected from one client will be organized in one place to better understand that client and also improve the relationship the company has with him or her.

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From the beginning of digitization of companies in the 90s, these kind of platform evolved and improved very much, because they have been adapted to the increasing needs of an ever-changing world, where technology has more and more possibilities. Salesforce holds one of the best CRMs of the market, and in its website, they consolidate the benefits of its platform in 10 key concepts:

• Improved contact management.
• Team collaboration.
• Productivity augmentation.
• Sales management capacitation.
• Precise sales forecast.
• Reliable reports.
• Improved sales metrics.
• Client satisfaction and retention upgraded.
• Marketing ROI fuelled.
• Enriched products and services.

Benefits of using a CRM

In the first place, the most important CRM tools right now, like the Salesforce ecosystem, are Cloud-based. This is a key component of their success and functioning, because it substitutes difficulties and extra costs of installing costly software in hundreds or thousands of computers, which are sometimes distributed in several locations (even in different countries). The software of a CRM is available through safe online environments, which means that a Cloud computing service erases all these previous complications.

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At the same time, this relocation of the service to a Cloud environment allows the apparition two other benefits that are tremendously positive for every type of organization. On one hand, the fact that this service is accessible online and not located in a single physical place, it opens up the opportunity of working remotely. Every employee will have the same ability to access the same information in any place, in any given time. So this benefit brings connectivity, speeds up processes and simplifies tasks for the professionals undertaking those tasks.

When you base your CRM solution on a Cloud environment, it will help you reduce costs

On the other hand, when you base your CRM solution on a Cloud environment, it will help you reduce costs: the implementation of these services does not require the installation of hardware or any other big changes inside the company. Besides, CRM services are usually flexible regarding the quantity of users that have access and the functionalities they can make use of, because they rely on pay-per-use formulas.

Who can benefit from a CRM tool?

From the Learning Centre of Salesforce we get the advice that the implementation of a CRM solution can be beneficial all across the entire organization:

• Sales teams can use a CRM to better understand any given cannel, for example, in order to discover which are the results of a single campaign or how good has been the performance of a team or product.
• Marketing departments can use a CRM to generate better forecasts about the client using, for example, their behaviour on social media.
• Customer care services can trace conversation through all the channels, especially now that we talk about multi-channel or omnichannel services (telephone, social or email…), so a CRM can enable them to control the flux of information.
• Supply chain and procurement services can track their relationship with vendors and improve the development of these processes to make them more efficient.
• Human resources can obtain benefits from a CRM to accelerate processes of integration of new talent, automating candidate selection management, or identifying professional needs for a company, based on digital skills.

Mostly, a CRM solution allows that all the data that comes from each and every department, can be stored and aligned in a single place, in order to turn it into valuable information for the business development.

ISDI and Salesforce’ partnership

The recent strategic alliance between the business school ISDI and the IT services giant Salesforce has given birth to a new project called ISDI CRM. This business school will train professionals in the Salesforce environment, with the capacity of issuing certifications as an official partner.

In an event that took place last February, experts from the sector pointed out that the demand of professionals linked to the CRM ecosystem has grown a 233%.  Spanish companies need experts qualified in this type of technology that has risen to be one of the most important ones in the job market: Enrique Polo, Spain Country Leader at Salesforce, underlined that the “Salesforce economy” will generate, counting direct and indirect jobs, over 100.000 employment opportunities in our country, between the years 2019 and 2024.