Think a CRM is just a basic sales tool? Or worse—a glorified contact list? We’ll gladly prove you wrong.
When used to its full potential, a CRM platform can enhance your entire sales process, make everyone on the team more productive, and drive your bottom line and profitability through the roof.
Here’s everything you need to know about the difference a CRM will make in your business.
But before we delve into CRM benefits, let's first explain what CRM is.
What Is a CRM?
At its core, CRM software is the single source of truth for all sales activities. If you implement it correctly and use it regularly, it’s where you’ll find details about a lead, a customer’s purchase history, notes from sales calls, customer service interactions, contact preferences, and more.
In other words: your CRM has everything you need to win new revenue and delight customers at every touchpoint.
CRM Basics You Need Before We Jump In
We’ll dive deep into CRM benefits in a few moments. Before we do, let’s cover some essential CRM features you should be aware of as you go:
- Communication: Email sync, calendar view, calling capabilities, SMS, call recording, and more features you can use to reach out to the right person and say the right thing in sales calls and emails
- Automation: Templates and workflow triggers that automate and streamline activities that are important but time-consuming and tedious, like following up
- Reporting: Understand the health of your sales pipeline and the performance of individual reps, geographies, products, and more
- Integrations: Make your CRM and your other tools, like marketing, analytics, and support, more powerful by integrating them
When choosing a CRM, you’ll run into a few choices to make, like:
- Cloud-based CRM vs. on-premises CRM: Cloud-based is scalable and universally accessible, while on-premises requires on-site servers or local installation
- Industry-specific vs. generic: Some providers offer dedicated CRM solutions for industries like real estate, healthcare, and law firms, while others take the more generic route and offer customizations
Before we jump into specific benefits of using a CRM in your business, consider this: when your CRM implementation is successful, you’ll see high adoption, lots of time spent in the CRM, better collaboration on deals, and better visibility of your sales data.
In case it’s not obvious: all of that translates to sales reps equipped to make more sales and create a fantastic customer experience.
11 Benefits of a CRM for Your Business
Without further delay, here are 11 key benefits of CRM software:
1. Automation of the Sales Process and Workflow
Picture this scenario:
You’re starting your workday. You want to follow up with some prospects you spoke to in recent weeks, so you spend 30 minutes compiling your list of people to email. Once you have a list of 10, you spend 15 minutes writing and sending each email, referencing multiple notes, and double-checking all the information you’re including in the emails.
Once you’re done, nearly half your workday is gone—as is much of your energy.
Now imagine this:
You’re starting that same workday, but instead of spending hours manually checking in with each lead, your CRM does it for you on autopilot. The automation is triggered by the number of days since last contact and uses the tried-and-true email templates that you’ve built into your CRM platform.
In the first hour of the day, two of those follow-ups result in replies. It happened while you were closing a different deal on a call. In other words, you’ve moved three prospects forward in less time by doing fewer—but more impactful—tasks.
According to LinkedIn’s State of Sales report, sales pros only spend 30 percent of their time on selling activities, while the rest goes to admin and other non-selling tasks. The issue with that? Admin work isn’t how you close deals. The magic of CRM is in its power to turn your everyday tasks into automations, so your sales process can run in the background while you focus on conversations and connections.
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Close's Workflow automation takes this productivity boost even further, seamlessly integrating with your CRM platform to orchestrate your sales process. Imagine having the ability to automate follow-ups, prioritize leads, and personalize outreach based on lead behavior—all without manual effort.
With Close's Workflows, you can transform time-consuming tasks into efficient automations that run in the background, allowing you to concentrate on meaningful conversations and connections. It's the perfect solution to reclaim a significant portion of your workday and ensure that your sales team spends more of their valuable time on selling activities, as highlighted in LinkedIn’s State of Sales report.
2. Better Task Management and More Productivity
You’ll probably agree with me on this: salespeople are generally a stressed-out bunch. A sales career is inherently one driven by results and high pressure—there’s no denying that.
In fact, one study found that 67 percent of sales reps feel burnt out or close to that point, 57 percent say their workload exceeds their capacity, and 67 percent work long hours to keep up with the job demands.
So if you’re overwhelmed by dozens of tasks, the fear of missing your sales quota, looming deadlines, and an untamed workload, remember these two things:
First, you’re (clearly) not alone;
And second, it doesn’t have to be that way.
A CRM system allows you to track your tasks, assign activities to a team member, sync and view your calendar, receive reminders, and follow a defined workflow for every lead and customer you talk to.
It’s a reliable place to manage everything you do and stay on top of your workload without worrying you’ll forget an appointment, lose a note, or accidentally drop a hot lead. Ever.
(Have you been unconsciously holding your breath during this section? You can breathe out now.)
3. Effective Sales Pipeline Management and Performance Tracking
Your sales pipeline is a visual overview of your current leads and prospects and the stage of your sales process they’re currently in. It’s the ultimate real-time snapshot of the health of your sales engine.
And when you manage it with a CRM as opposed to a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, or another DIY solution, you get the advantage of:
- Knowing your sales velocity, or how quickly leads move through the sales cycle and each of its stages
- Spotting a bottleneck where leads tend to stay longer, which means you can troubleshoot it and tweak the process
- Focusing on the right deals based on their value and likelihood to close
- Tracking the sales team’s performance, like seeing which stages reps struggle with, so you can give them useful feedback and relevant training
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CRM users get to focus on the right lead and the right task at the right time—a surefire way to win.
4. Efficient Sales Team Communication
There’s a lot going on in a sales team at any given moment. Emails, phone calls, demos, meetings, and negotiations—you name it.
This can make sales collaboration tough because details that help close a deal can easily get lost in such a busy, fast-moving environment.
“That’s not such a big deal,” you might think. But take this example:
One of your reps has been working on a deal to bring your company $55,000 in annual revenue. It’s near the finish line, but some final details need to be ironed out before the contract signing. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the rep had to take some time off work, and another rep is picking up where he left off.
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But to close the deal, he needs specific info about the tiers and features the prospect has considered and the concerns he raised—and that’s buried in personal notes and files of the rep who’s out of office for an undefined period.
The deal is now on hold, and a significant amount of your revenue for the year is on the line.
CRM completely erases this issue. It brings all customer information, including preferences and details from sales calls, to one platform. It removes barriers between not just sales reps, but also between entire departments like marketing and customer service teams.
5. Mobile Accessibility and Selling Anywhere
The most successful sales reps are those with the most flexibility and adaptability. They have a bias for action and take every opportunity to move a deal forward, even if they’re not at their desk or near their laptop.
Making a call. Replying to an email or making a quick SMS check-in. Prepping for a meeting. Can you do that when you’re away from your usual workplace? With a CRM—the right one—you can.
The right CRM, of course, is the one that works as a mobile app that taps into the CRM’s most impactful features, like calling, sales notes, email templates, activity tracking, lead creation, and more. A powerful sales tool in your pocket means you can be proactive, win new customers, and hit your quota no matter where you are.
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6. Integrations With Powerful Tools
Been picky and specific about the tools in your tech stack? Good. That means you’ve found those that best match your needs.
With a CRM, you can take those tools to the next level. How? Add layers of your CRM data to tools like calendar schedulers, email marketing platforms, live chat software, e-signature tools, and sales call analysis programs. And on top of native integrations, you can also use options like Zapier to connect your CRM to hundreds of apps.
Here are just a few things CRM integrations can help you do:
- Automate the workflow behind contracts and e-signatures by automatically adding your lead’s contact information and other details to your e-signing tool
- Turn new leads into subscribers of specific marketing sequences and emails in your marketing automation platform
- Sync your CRM data with your customer support tool to get full context about a customer when they reach out for help
A CRM system gives your tech stack superpowers. Want inspo on what else you can do? Check out Close integrations.
7. Better Customer Support
Exceptional customer service is no longer what makes businesses stand out—it’s table stakes.
The CX Trends 2023 report shows that 72 percent of customers want immediate service, and 70 percent expect anyone they interact with to have full context about their issue. Without a CRM, meeting these expectations is nearly impossible because you simply don’t have the information at your fingertips when you need it.
CRM software breaks down silos between what the sales team learned about a customer during the sales process and what the customer later needs help with. It lets you track every customer interaction, question, and challenge, so you can respond instantly and resolve the problem fully.
And all of that without the customer having to repeat themselves to different reps in case of multiple interactions. Want a surefire strategy for high customer satisfaction? CRM is it.
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8. Improved Customer Relationships and Retention
Effective customer support didn’t convince you? This should: CRM helps you cultivate stronger customer relationships, leading to loyalty and customer retention.
And loyal, long-term customers are the key to a healthy business. Data from Smile.io shows that the top 10 percent of customers spend twice as much as the lower 90 percent, with the top 1 percent of customers spending 2.5 times more than the lower 99 percent. Customer relationships are a mighty investment.
CRM tools make this possible because they centralize all customer data and interactions in one place. This means you can:
- Personalize every single interaction you have with them
- Upsell and cross-sell based on specific customer needs
- Run targeted marketing campaigns
For example, when a customer reaches out about an issue, you can tell them something like:
“When we spoke [X weeks/months] ago, you mentioned you were figuring out [a different issue]. How is that going for you now?”
This has two benefits. First, the customer will feel valued and cared for. And second, you can create a chance to offer them a more fitting product, feature, or plan, which will drive more results for them—and increase their trust in you.
Putting your customers front and center this way—all thanks to your CRM—reduces churn and increases customer lifetime value.
9. Actionable Tracking, Analytics, and Forecasting
Your CRM tells you how well you’ve been doing and the direction you’re going in. If things aren’t going the way you want them to, your CRM won’t sugarcoat it for you. Sales metrics don’t lie.
Missed your sales quota? Low sales conversion rate? High churn? It’s all in there.
This transparency is good (although sometimes difficult to handle). It means you can track the results of your work, double down on activities that work, and improve areas where you seem to struggle.
Here are some examples of this:
- Your lead-to-customer conversion rate drops → You can work with your marketing team to check if the quality of leads they generate has changed and why
- One sales rep converts more leads than other reps → You uncover that this rep does more follow-ups per lead and prioritizes demos over sales presentations, which is useful info for other reps
- There’s a spike in new leads for a specific product because of a press campaign → You can allocate more reps to those leads to strike while the iron is hot
In short: CRM lets you take data-backed action quickly, whether to fix a funnel leak or double down on a successful strategy.
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10. Strong Data Security and Privacy
How would you feel if your email address, phone number, date of birth, or even your home address were leaked by a company you’ve purchased from?
I certainly wouldn’t want that company anywhere near my personal data in the future.
And data breaches aren’t rare—over 400 million people were victims of data breaches in 2022. “It won’t happen to me” just doesn’t cut it as a data security strategy.
The more you sell, the more access you have to details about people, including contact information, revenue numbers, previous purchases, and issues your customers trusted you with. Keeping these in physical or digital notes, spreadsheets, and on multiple devices doesn’t make them secure.
A CRM helps through encryption and compliance with standards and regulations like SOC 2, GDPR, and CCPA. This shouldn’t be an afterthought for you—your reputation hinges on it.
11. Increased Revenue Growth
Finally, a CRM solution fuels revenue growth. It increases your impact at every touchpoint and every stage of the customer journey, including:
- Lead generation: Find which leads convert better than others so you and your marketing team can focus on the right ones
- Sales conversations: Spot hot leads that are likely to be in the decision stage and customize your pitch based on previous conversations
- Customer loyalty and retention: Check in regularly, solve customer issues quickly, and recognize needs based on customer behavior like product usage and buying patterns
Leaning on a CRM means putting your customers front and center. It’s what will set you apart from your competitors and allow you to not only grow your revenue, but do so in a sustainable, scalable way.
To enhance your understanding and tracking of this growth, utilize our revenue growth calculator for precise, insightful analytics tailored to your business needs.
Drive Your Business Growth with a CRM
CRM isn’t a trend. It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s an essential tool for tracking potential customers, turning them into sales opportunities, and closing valuable deals.
With a CRM, sales managers can lead a team of ambitious, inspired, satisfied people. And sales reps can be those people. The best CRM is the one you can adjust to your needs and do all of your work from—every day. Start your 14-day free trial of Close to see what’s possible.
