CRM collects, connects, and analyzes all your customer data to give you insights into how your prospects and customers interact with your brand. The usual channels or points of contact that CRM collects data from are our websites, live chat, emails, phones, advertising, analytics, virtual and even physical meetings.
Benefits of CRM System
CRM systems offer numerous major benefits for companies and in many cases, it is a company’s first big investment in order to improve company outcomes and manage growth.
With that, let me share with you some of the most profound CRM system benefits:
- Improved Customer Service: Because CRM software helps you to collect and store all your past customer interactions, it helps your customer representatives to create personalized experiences by having all the needed information. This really allows your representative to focus on your customers and their problems rather than finding out and searching for information about the customer.
- Better Marketing Outcome: The CRM system helps companies track their marketing campaigns and see how they performed. It gives essential information like how many leads did the campaign generated, how many of them became opportunities and sales, what was the cost per lead and sales, and much more information. All this information can be utilized to improve marketing outcomes and stop those campaigns that underperform.
- Improving Sales Outcomes: The CRM system is the best friend of salespeople. It helps to track all the interactions and automate data entry. It helps salespeople to stay on top of the game by giving reminders, showing the best sales opportunities, creating sales reports, and in many more ways, CRM helps improve sales performance and happiness.
- Increasing productivity: CRM uses powerful automation and AI technology to help your employees to do more with less. For marketing, this can be marketing automation and collecting data from different sources, for sales it helps with discovering opportunities and fostering important relationships, and for your customer service CRM system helps to manage multiple channels at once from the same platform. The productivity benefits are endless.
- Improving Collaboration: Having centralized data helps employees to share important data, collaborate on tasks, and quickly respond to requests without too many disruptions. On top of that, CRM standardizes data management, thus everybody speaks the same language, thus less miscommunication happens.
- Better Reporting: Proper reporting is crucial for business leaders to make the right decision impact. CRM system helps synch all your essential data into one platform making reporting much easier and trustworthy by eliminating manual tasks that are prone to mistakes. Thus, ending up with clean data and clean and complete reports.
- Scaling Your Processes: The CRM system is great for standardizing business processes, ensuring everybody follows company processes as you grow. This makes it easier to onboard new employees, speeds up the adoption rate, and increases new employees’ productivity.
4 Major Differences of ERP and CRM
ERP and CRM systems are focused on different parts of your business to increase profitability. As said, ERP system is focusing on the back end of your business, helping you improve business processes and reduce CAPEX and OPEX on those processes, while CRM is purely focused on increasing the profitability of a company by improving sales, marketing, and customer service.
And despite many ERP systems that come with CRM capabilities, but a CRM system provides far more features and functionalities than what’s included in an ERP system.
However, let’s have a look at the four major differences between ERP and CRM systems:
1. Users Focus
The first main difference between ERP and CRM systems is the focus on users.
ERP system is mainly focusing on users across departments such as finance and accounting, purchasing, supply chain, procurement, manufacturing, operations, and human resources. Any back-end activities your business performs will most likely be done using an ERP system.
CRM system is focusing on users across departments such as sales, marketing, field service/technicians, and customer service. Any front-end business activities regarding your employees interacting with customers and acquiring customers will be handled with help of using a CRM system.
2. Processes Focus
Another main difference between CRM and ERP systems is their focus on business processes.
ERP system manages the following back end activities:
- Supply chain operations
- Financial reporting and forecasting
- Risk management and compliance
- Tracking project progress and costs
- Payroll
- Accounting and financial activities
- Warehouse and inventory operations
- Automation and streamlining repetitive tasks
- Collaboration with vendors
- Lowering purchasing costs
And any other related back-end activities your business performs.
CRM system manages the following front-end activities:
- Track marketing efforts and campaigns
- Manage the sales pipeline
- Automate customer service processes
- Streamline and automate sales processes
- Track customer interactions and touchpoints across different channels
- Create sales, marketing, and customer reports
- Share data and collaborate with teams for better outcomes
- Manage business leads, opportunities, and customers
- Creating lead scoring
- Manage inventory based on historical data
And any other related front-end activities your business performs.
3. Core Functions
ERP and CRM systems are both robust technologies pack with full of features and capabilities that can benefit your business.
And as mentioned both of these business softwares are focused on different aspects and processes of your business.
The core functions that most ERP systems provide are:
- Accounting and Financial Management
- Inventory Management
- Human Resources Management
- Supply Chain Management
- Manufacturing Management
- Reporting and Analytics
- Automation and Workflows
- Customer Relationship Management
The core functions that most CRM systems provide are:
- Lead Management
- Contact Management
- Pipeline Management
- Field Service Management
- Marketing & Email Automation
- Customer Service Automation
- Reporting and Analytics
- Automation and Workflows
Of course, both of these software’s provide their reporting and analytics that are based on the data they collect. The same applies to automation and workflows, the functions are different based on the business processes you are going to automate.
4. Industries
Both of the systems have their benefits and most of the businesses will see improvements in their business processes using either of those.
Also, most likely larger companies will have both of these tools implemented. However, certain industries are more prone and benefit by using ERP or CRM systems just based on the daily processes.
For example, if your company is mainly focusing on client work, managing customers, then CRM will be more beneficial to you, but if your business is more based on managing your resources, money, and assets, then ERP would be a better choice for you.
So, here are some of the industries that benefit from using ERP or CRM systems:
