Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM)

If you look back ten years ago before cloud storage, before Facebook advertising, before twitter, really, before the Internet was used for basically everything for business; you would see offices full of faxes, sticky notes, and contact rolodexes all with scattered information on clients. The rise of   web 2.0 has brought a fantastic and almost necessary tool for keeping all this information on clients and outputting very useful data for targeting markets, this software is called Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM).  I have personally used this software and seen the amazing data that it can output just from all the data being in one system. CRM’s can help marketing departments really get to know their customers and remarkably target certain markets.

So what exactly is a CRM?

According to Salesforce, the largest CRM software company in the country, “At its simplest, a CRM system allows businesses to manage business relationships and the data and information associated with them. With CRM, you can store customer and prospect contact information, accounts, leads and sales opportunities in one central location”. This ability to store all customer, B2B, and internal information allows for companies to create reports that can output data on any information that has been collected. With the huge serge in Internet speeds over the past 5 years, CRM’s have also been going completely cloud based, allowing for information to be added and stored

 anywhere, IN REAL TIME!  These CRM systems now are also being integrated with all social media platforms too. This is allowing marketers to know when the perfect time to target a single particular customer is on social media. Can you imagine that? A targeted ad can be sent to just you, automatically, by just giving the system a set of rules.

            

This is just me guessing, but soon enough marketers are not going to exist. Once these CRM systems get smarter, and they are, the system will know exactly the correct wording, exactly the correct email, exactly the correct time of day to send an email, and exactly what product/service to offer a client, all just by knowing what the client is talking about on social media. If your interested in what I’m talking about this is a great video to watch.