What CRM is, in an owner's terms
Today, one quote request comes in on the sales agent's phone, another on the contact e-mail, another through the form on the website. Each person keeps their own customers in their own address book. When the agent goes on holiday, nobody knows what they promised Tuesday's customer.
That is what a CRM solves. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, the management of your relationship with customers. In practice, it is a program where the whole company sees the same thing about each customer: contact details, what they asked for, what quotes they received, what they bought, what complaints they had and who looks after them.
A CRM system is not just a bigger address book. The difference is that it also tells you what comes next: which lead has not been called, which quote has been waiting a week for an answer, which customer has not ordered for three months.
What CRM means for a small or mid-sized company
What CRM means in practice depends on the size of the company. In a large company, the CRM has whole departments behind it. In an SME, three simple things matter:
- You stop losing requests. Every lead goes into a list, with its source (website, phone, campaign) and a person responsible for it.
- You know where each sale stands. You see by stage how many requests are new, how many have a quote sent, how many are in negotiation and how many have closed.
- You do not depend on one person's memory. The history stays in the customer record, not in the agent's phone.
For example, a distribution company with five sales agents gets requests in a month from the website, from trade fairs and from existing customers. With a CRM, the manager sees in the morning who has leads not yet called and which large quotes are sitting unanswered.
What a CRM keeps about customers
In the applications built by Veziv, a CRM usually has:
- The customer record, with the full history: orders, contracts, invoices, products delivered, complaints and notes from every conversation.
- Leads collected automatically from the website forms, from Google Sheets or from BestJobs, with a score and the source marked.
- Sales stages (pipeline) that you define, with reminders and rescheduling.
- Company details filled in from the tax ID (CUI), so you no longer copy the name, address and CAEN activity code by hand.
- Campaigns and bulk messages, plus a loyalty programme and customer cards where needed.
- GDPR consents for each contact.
The details are on the CRM and marketing module page.
The types of CRM you come across
In practice, "CRM" covers several things. Some programs focus on contacts (who the customer is and what was said), others on sales (stages, quotes, agents), others on marketing (campaigns, leads) or on support (tickets and complaints). A custom CRM takes only the parts you need and links them to the rest of the company's programs.
A real example: qualified leads for a loan broker
For AVBS, a loan intermediary, Veziv built a step-by-step form on the website. The visitor answers a few questions and confirms their phone with a code received by SMS, and the lead gets a status by itself: unqualified, qualified by loan type, with full details. The leads then go into the e-mail marketing program according to rules set by the company. The sales team calls only people with a verified phone and a completed request.
The full story is in the article about lead capture at AVBS.
CRM and ERP: where one ends and the other begins
The CRM covers the road to "yes" and the relationship afterwards. When the customer confirms the order, the ERP takes over: stock, production, delivery note, invoice, payment. If you want to know more, read what ERP means.
In many companies, the two are linked. The quote goes out from the CRM, the customer confirms it through a link, and the order goes straight into sales and quotes and estimates, without being typed in a second time.
When a CRM system is worth it
It is worth thinking about a CRM when:
- requests come from more than two places and you do not know exactly how many got an answer;
- you have at least two people selling and you overlap on the same customers;
- you cannot say quickly how many quotes are open and what they are worth;
- an old customer left and you found out months later.
If this sounds familiar, the next step is to write down how a request moves through your company today, from the first phone call to the invoice. With that list, the talk about a CRM becomes concrete. The steps we go through together are described in developing a CRM, ERP or mobile app from scratch, and you will find delivered projects in our projects.
Want to see what it would look like for your company? Write to us and we will show you a CRM built by Veziv on an example from your line of business.