What Is a CRM? A Practical Small-Business Explanation
CRM stands for customer relationship management. In practice, CRM software gives a team a shared place to organize customer and prospect information, sales activity and follow-up.
The five jobs a CRM usually needs to do
- Keep contact and company records organized.
- Capture the history of interactions.
- Track sales opportunities through a process.
- Assign follow-up tasks and ownership.
- Give the team enough reporting to see what is happening.
When spreadsheets start to break down
The problem is rarely the spreadsheet itself. It is the loss of shared context: duplicate records, unclear ownership, stale stages and follow-up hidden in personal inboxes.
What to evaluate
Prioritize adoption, workflow fit, data quality and integrations before advanced features your team may never use.