Your CRM playbook.

What is CRM?

If you own or work in any kind of customer-centric organization, a customer relationship management (CRM) system can serve as the single source of truth for your customer data, giving you actionable insights into your ongoing sales and marketing initiatives and overall organizational health. Adding CRM to your toolbox is an important step in taking control of business, keeping your customer data organized, and making it easier to connect, win, deliver, and grow with customers at every stage of their journey. But what does a system like this actually offer? Let’s start with the basics.

Customer relationship management

CRM literally stands for “customer relationship management,” and it’s an appropriate description for the tool. CRM is a software application that helps your organization keep track of and manage all your interactions with current, potential and former customers to help strengthen and maintain customer relationships — and their loyalty to you.

Streamlining the sales process

With the ability to create sales pipelines to track where people are in their customer journey and document all communication from the first interaction to the final sale, CRM provides deep visibility and oversight of your marketing, sales and customer support process. With CRM, streamlining activities and closing deals becomes faster and easier—giving your team the tools to win more business with less effort.

Improving internal communication

CRM allows your entire team to collaborate effortlessly by keeping notes, tracking tasks, and managing processes in one central place that’s accessible to all users — making it easy for everyone to stay on the same page about your base of prospects and customers … so that no lead or sale slips through the cracks. Jump here for a quick primer on CRM key terms — or check out Copper 101 for a full breakdown.

Overall, CRM is an online database that tracks information about customers and their interactions with your company. You can then analyze this data to better understand your relationships, sales cycle and revenue.

How to tell if you need CRM

Not sure if your organization needs a CRM system? Here are some things to consider:

Your contact list has become too large to manage manually

CRM is traditionally centered around managing customer relationships, and the right CRM can help all of your team members become more efficient in this initiative. Any team member is a potential relationship maker who interacts with prospects, partners, investors and other stakeholders — making tracking conversations, anticipating what your contacts need, and minimizing friction as you close a deal or complete a project ultra important for your entire team. CRM provides you with the data, organization and accountability required to nurture your critical relationships, at scale — so you can keep the conversation going and always know what to say next.

More than one person handles sales

If there’s more than one person handling sales for your organization, you need a centralized database to keep track of sales activities. Sure, it may seem like you can get away with using sticky notes or a spreadsheet, but for how long? As your customer base grows, disparate tools can quickly become unmanageable. The minute your team can’t locate an important customer name or phone number, you can bet you’ll find yourself wishing you had the tools to win more deals with a CRM system. Not only does CRM consolidate all of your contacts’ information, it also gives you a full picture of the sales process by capturing your interaction history with each contact and providing insight into trends and patterns in your customer data — from the number of prospects coming in to how many deals each salesperson is closing.

You have a hard time segmenting your leads or prospects

The sheer volume of prospects can be a challenge, especially for smaller businesses — how do you funnel thousands of contacts into a system that then lets you search, tag, and review them en masse? CRM was built to help you organize all of your existing prospects in a way that makes sense for your unique organizational model. A CRM system helps you take in, store, and manage large amounts of data from multiple sources without a glitch, including website forms, email, landing pages and other sources. Have you ever tried to herd all those squirrels using a spreadsheet? Not so easy.

Your data is jumbled in a single spreadsheet — or scattered across multiple spreadsheets

If your projects, notes, data and meetings are all stored separately (in different apps or spreadsheets) — or you’ve cobbled together a behemoth of a single spreadsheet to try to jam all the data in one place — you may be spending more of your time searching for information than actually using that data to inform your decisions and benefit your business. One of CRM’s main attractions is its organization and searchability capabilities; not only can you store all of your information together, but it’s organized in an intuitive way that allows you to easily find the information you need in minutes or seconds — not hours — giving you the freedom to grow without operational bottlenecks.

You have month-long (or longer) sales cycles

For some organizations, closing a successful deal can take months and numerous interactions, or “touches,” with the customer. The keys to success are consistency and organization; a robust CRM system captures the details of each interaction so that you know what step to take next and are prepared for that interaction. It will also remind you of upcoming events and milestones and provide visibility into ongoing deals at your company.

Repeat business is vital to your success

Great relationships are built on the backs of small details. From remembering your customer’s favorite sports team to knowing their preferred method of communication, CRM makes it easy to take notes and document the little details that make these relationships stronger — even down to birthdays or other event reminders. CRM task management features help ensure customers don’t fall through the cracks and so that your team can deliver customer experiences that build long-term relationships.

How different teams use CRM

CRM helps keep your entire organization on the same page and ensures consistency across departments. As the single source of truth, team members from every department have access to the same insights, making it nearly effortless to stay in sync and communicate effectively.

While customer-facing teams will find the most daily value, your entire organization can benefit from the immediate visibility and cross-team collaboration that CRM provides.

Sales

For sales reps and account executives, CRM offers:

• A centralized and portable database of all customers and prospects
• The ability to track sales deals, view past sales activities, manage future activities, and search customer data

Leadership

CRM can help standardize sales data entry and sales reporting, which is crucial if you want to establish and track key performance indicators (KPIs) for sales. If you’re a team leader, business owner or in the C-suite, the visibility makes it easier to report on how your team is doing and adjust strategy to help you hit your targets and connect, win, deliver, and grow.

Marketing

CRM gathers valuable customer insights that allow teams to:

• Measure the impact of marketing campaigns
• Review customer data for behavioral trends
• Segment customers for targeted marketing

It also enhances communication between marketing, sales, and customer success teams.

Customer support

CRM tools help customer service teams get a clear, detailed view of the customer journey — everything from how a purchase was made to what issues have come up since. With this insight, support reps can respond more quickly and effectively, offering solutions that are informed by a customer’s full history and previous interactions.

They’re also key to boosting retention and reducing churn. For example, in tech companies, account managers can easily filter accounts to see which renewals are coming up in the next 90 days and start outreach early — whether that’s to secure the renewal or explore upsell opportunities. And with automatic email syncing, every conversation is tracked and accessible, so no one’s left guessing about the last touchpoint.

Admin staff

Admins are the unsung heroes of smooth CRM adoption. In bigger companies, there might be a dedicated CRM whiz who trains the team, creates easy-to-follow guides, and keeps things running like clockwork. Some even have an IT sidekick on standby for the rare tech hiccup — though a solid CRM shouldn’t need a tech degree to use.

For smaller teams, there’s no need to stress about a dedicated admin role. The right CRM should be simple enough to manage without extra hands, making it easy to divide and conquer across the team.

Finance

Finance teams can get a lot more done when they’re looped in. With CRM access, A/R specialists can quickly see if a customer asking for a refund or credit has already flagged issues—and how the support team handled it.

No more digging through inboxes or chasing down updates. Everyone’s working off the same info, which means Finance and Support can team up to resolve billing concerns faster, and with way fewer headaches.

How to choose a CRM system for your organization

Once you’re ready to select a CRM system, start by looking for the following things:

Ease of use

We cannot overstate how important this is for an organization to succeed with CRM. A CRM system that’s easy for workers from any generation to learn how to use will ensure that your team can get onboarded and educated on the platform quickly and without too much of a learning curve. This looks like:

• Seamless integration with your email system. An effective CRM platform will smoothly integrate with Gmail or Outlook so you don’t have to manually record every single message.
• Drag-and-drop. Being able to edit and move opportunities easily between stages by dragging and dropping is a huge time-saver and helps provide high-level visibility. Just make sure there isn’t a steep learning curve to accomplish this.
• Web / mobile app. CRM that offers both a web and mobile app provides more flexibility for teams that are often on the go or are distributed or working remotely.
• Visibility. Having a birds-eye-view of your organization’s sales and revenue provides a ton of value. It’s important to be able to access quick insights on things like email responses, upcoming tasks and open deals.

Easy to set up, maintain, and scale

Ease of use is one thing, but CRM systems that are hard to set up or take a ton of implementation time may not be worth the investment — especially for smaller organizations with limited resources. Look for:

• Straightforward account setup. Consider cloud-based CRM. You shouldn’t need to download and install software, or rely on a team of engineers dedicating numerous weeks setting it up and customizing it for your team.
• No-code customization. One helpful customization feature is custom-tagging, which makes it easy to find and label data. Just make sure that it’s straightforward enough for any team lead to make these adjustments — not a developer.
• Flexibility. Look into how flexible the CRM is and whether it will be able to meet your organization’s unique needs. For example, can you quickly create custom pipelines and records that make sense for your organization?
• Able to grow with your organization. It’s incredibly painful to have to switch CRM systems as soon as your business grows a bit in size. Look for a tool that can be as simple or as dynamic as you need it to be, so it can scale with you as your business grows and evolves — whether that means adding more pipelines or increasing your user numbers.

Fits your business workflow(s)

The best CRM software for your organization will fit easily into your existing workflows — not the other way around. Implementing a CRM tool shouldn’t require major adjustments to your team members’ regular processes or the main workflows that keep your business running smoothly. Some factors include:

• Native integration with your daily tools. Integrating with the tools you use everyday just makes sense — like Slack, DocuSign and Quickbooks. Whatever CRM you choose should be easy to incorporate into your day-to-day processes.
• Multiple pipelines. The ability to create deals in multiple sales pathways (or “pipelines”) and easily differentiate between them offers your organization more options and flexibility as it grows and evolves. Even better if those pipelines can be assigned to different organization units and territories.
• Projects. A CRM tool that extends beyond the sale will offer value to more teams throughout your organization — like project and task management across customer success, project delivery and product deployment efforts.

Benefits of using CRM

CRM makes it simpler to win new clients and retain them by tracking contacts and opportunities to more effectively manage your relationships. Some of the top benefits of using CRM include:

Simplified contact organization

Organize your emails, calls, SMS, notes and files for every contact in one place — no more scattered contact information. With CRM, you can say goodbye to disorganized spreadsheets and start seeing the entire history of relationships from your CRM — or even your inbox.

Improved revenue and conversions

CRM can help companies drive more value from customers by better nurturing current customers and identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Organizations that focus on retention efforts using CRM are also able to reduce customer churn and increase profitability with higher customer lifetime values. In general, CRM has been reported to increase conversion rates by up to 300%, improve sales by up to 29%, and provide an ROI of up to $30.48 for every dollar invested. One Copper customer in the retail space was able to increase their revenue by 10X after onboarding our CRM software.

Task automation

Get rid of busy work and time-consuming manual tasks. CRM makes it simple to automate tasks, log calls, prepare for meetings, attach files, and more. Features like data importing, email templates and suggested contacts all help make your workday easier. Just think about all that time you'll save.

Streamlined deal tracking

CRM makes it easy to capture leads and track conversations — so you know what’s happening at all times and never drop the ball on a deal.

Detailed reports

CRM gives you a quick, 360-degree view of your business, offering clarity on what’s working and what isn’t. Plus, reporting makes it possible to forecast income and prepare and adapt your marketing and sales efforts accordingly.

Project management

Certain CRM systems can also double as a project management tool. With pipeline creation and team collaboration features, CRM enables you to manage your entire organization in one place.

Strengthened cross-departmental communication

With a CRM, cross-departmental communication isn’t just easier—it’s effortless. Whether you’ve got 17 hybrid teams or just a few, everyone stays on the same page, shares updates in real time, and works together seamlessly—all within one central platform.

CRM key terms

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