A CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) is the system in which an organisation records customers, contacts, leads and the associated interactions — from first contact to quote and aftercare. Well-known examples are HubSpot, Pipedrive and Salesforce.
A CRM in practice
The value of a CRM stands or falls with completeness: as soon as part of the customer information lives in mailboxes and loose sheets, the pipeline no longer adds up and the system loses trust. That is why the most important setup choice is not which fields you add, but which actions you automate so that recording is not extra work.
The biggest gain lies in the connections: leads from your website automatically into the CRM, won deals automatically flowing through to quote and invoice. How that works is covered in Automating quotes and invoices and on our pages about the HubSpot-Exact Online integration and Pipedrive-Moneybird integration.
Related terms
- ERP — An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning system) is one system that brings together a company's core administration: finance, purchasing, inventory, orders and often projects or production too.
- ATS — An ATS (Applicant Tracking System) is the candidate-tracking system of a recruitment organisation: vacancies, candidates, matches and the progress per procedure in one system.
- API integration — An API integration is a connection between two software systems that exchange data automatically via their APIs — for example orders from a webshop to the accounting system, or placements from an ATS to invoicing.
- Single source of truth — A single source of truth is the agreement that every piece of data has one leading source: customer data lives in the CRM, inventory in the POS or WMS, invoices in the accounting system.