Digital software solutions are all the rage now, and growing businesses are often proactively seeking out software solutions to help them with all sorts of processes. However, one of the early heavy hitters of the SaaS business model are CRMs. CRMs are here to stay, as they provide so much value from a customer interaction standpoint and also can store a variety of customer data than can be used by nearly every department in a growing business.

But what is a CRM? A CRM is a customer relationship management software that facilitates the process of customer relationship management. What this means is that a CRM allows you to manage all the different phases of your relationship with your customers. In doing so, a CRM brings together all the disparate business functions and departments that interact with customers into a central hub. This includes everything from the marketing and sales departments, to information management, to finance and accounting, to customer experience.

There is inherent value to this. For one, the marketing department and sales team can work together to warm up leads and contact them only when they have been given sufficient marketing materials online, such as interaction with targeted ads or downloading an ebook. This means that the potential customer has already expressed interest in the product or service offerings, which helps when outreaching for sales calls.

Another way that CRMs can help businesses is through their advanced reporting features. In fact, analytics ranks along with improving sales initiatives as among the most important uses of a CRM. Most CRM tools have this reporting capabilities, and offer advanced business intelligence functions such as the ability to generate custom reports with specific KPIs, advanced performance filters and integration with external data tools such as Google Analytics.

These reporting features can help your business know exactly where leads are coming from, who is generating these leads, and what the customer lifetime value is based off of these lead sources. For example, you may find that leads who come in through SEO have a higher amount of value than those generated through PPC. However, you cannot know this unless you utilize the full capabilities of a CRM. In doing so, you’ll be able to better qualify leads and understand the needs of customers by relying on past customer history data.

There are so many features that CRMs offer, all with the goal of helping your business thrive. While a CRM cannot solve all of your problems, it is an important tool in helping you evaluate and qualify leads, as well as increase interdepartmental cooperation. This is often an issue with sales teams and marketing departments, as they often work against each other to generate leads and demonstrate their value. Instead, sales and marketing should be working together to achieve set KPIs. Using a CRM helps this process along, and the targeting and data reporting features as invaluable for businesses that are looking to grow in the digital era.

I’ve also been looking at examples of the best metrics dashboards for another business and am very impressed with what is available, so take a look at those as you will likely end up getting one too.