CRM — Customer Relationship Management

What is CRM?

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is an IT system for managing customer relationships — a central database of contacts, leads, opportunities in the sales funnel, communication history, and purchases. The foundation of every B2B company with more than 5 salespeople.

CRM combines data from marketing (lead gen), sales (pipeline), customer success (onboarding, retention), and support (tickets) in a single 360° customer view.

Main CRMs

• Salesforce — enterprise, broadest ecosystem, expensive
• HubSpot — SMB → mid-market, great marketing + sales + CMS integration
• Pipedrive — simple, sales-first, good for 1-30 people
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 — large companies in MS ecosystem
• Zoho CRM — medium price, medium features
• Folk, Attio — new wave, more intuitive for startups

Key features

• Contacts & accounts — database of people and companies
• Pipeline / deals — sales funnel visualization by stages
• Activity tracking — emails, calls, meetings, notes
• Email integration — native (HubSpot, Salesforce Inbox) or plugin (Outreach)
• Automation / workflows — sequences, lead assignment, alerts
• Reporting & dashboards — pipeline value, win rate, velocity
• Integrations — marketing automation, support, accounting, BI

CRM in the marketing → sales funnel

1. Marketing delivers MQL to CRM
2. Sales qualifies as SQL and moves through stages
3. Customer Success takes over after deal close
4. Everyone has visibility into interaction history
5. Attribution modeling measures ROI of each touchpoint

Common mistakes

• No adoption — team returns to Excel because "you can't do it in CRM"
• Custom fields instead of standard — breaks integrations and reports
• No data hygiene — duplicates, old leads, inconsistent company names
• No workflow automation — everything manual

Related terms

• Lead generation — entry of leads to CRM
• ABM — account-based segmentation in CRM
• Marketing automation — integration with CRM
• Attribution modeling — ROI measurement in CRM
• B2B marketing — CRM context
• Marketing funnel — CRM stages