In the digital and mobile age, CRM tools and databases have become essential to any sales and marketing strategy.
This comprehensive guide takes you on an in-depth exploration of this subject, which is relevant to all businesses. We'll start by defining what a CRM database is, before looking at its benefits, how to manage it, and how to analyze it to maximize its potential. We'll also look at the latest technological advances, such as artificial intelligence, which are transforming this world.
Whether you're a small company or a large corporation, this article will provide you with all the keys you need to understand and master CRM databases.
As a reminder, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is software designed to manage and analyze interactions with customers and prospects, with the primary aim of increasing sales and improving customer satisfaction.
→ To achieve this, the necessary data must be centralized, stored and organized in a single space: the CRM database.
This essential component of any company's performance needs to be constantly enriched and updated. To achieve this, all employees involved in customer acquisition or retention - whether sales, marketing or customer service teams - need to fill in the CRM.
In short, the CRM database is the strategic asset that guarantees effective, consistent customer relationship management.
Typically, the CRM database also aggregates data from third-party marketing tools and platforms, which can be connected to the CRM viaintegrations. This makes it the sole source of reference for analyzing sales activity, tracking the progress of a costed proposal, or evaluating the results of a marketing campaign.
🔧 Technical operation
A database is an organized system for storing, managing and retrieving information. It is made up of tables with rows (records) and columns (fields), where each record represents a unique element, such as a customer, and each field contains specific information, such as a name or address. In a CRM, these databases store customer contact details, interactions, preferences and purchase histories. CRM uses an interface connected to the database to enable employees to enter, modify and consult this information.
The CRM database centralizes all information and events linked to the "customer lifecycle", providing the various teams in contact with customers and prospects with a complete and instantaneous view of interactions, current offers, needs and sales proposals, progress in the commercial relationship and any disputes.
The availability of complete, up-to-date, high-quality data is therefore a major challenge for all CRM users, and a key factor in maintaining good commercial and customer relations.
Salespeople and telemarketers are the first to benefit from a qualified CRM database. On a day-to-day basis, they reap multiple benefits:
A well-qualified database greatly facilitates the various tasks of marketing, whether in terms of campaigns, segmentation or communications automation:
An accurate, up-to-date overview of customer files boosts ticketing efficiency for desk teams. Customer service staff benefit from a complete and up-to-date database, enabling them to process requests efficiently and deliver the best possible experience:
In terms of management, the quality of the information stored enables actions to be prioritized according to sales potential and chances of success, in the short, medium and long term.
In addition, a centralized sales information database is used for sales reporting, enabling strategic decisions to be taken on sales policy and sales and marketing strategies.
As we'll see below, advanced analysis may require the recruitment of an expert data scientist to extract, analyze and interpret business data.
Whatever your industry, the quality of your CRM data is crucial: inaccurate or out-of-date information can distort analyses, damage customer relationships, and lead to missed opportunities and ineffective marketing and sales actions.
The main challenge for companies is to benefit from a clean, qualified, structured and up-to-date CRM database.
To benefit from high-quality sales data in CRM, companies have three main solutions:
Generally speaking, CRM is an "empty" tool into which the company has to inject its data. In reality, the integrator assists the customer in collecting, cleansing and structuring its information, in order to incorporate it in a clean and structured way. In the absence of an integrator (nowadays, the big names in commercial software offer SaaS subscriptions from their websites), your databases can also be imported via various file formats.
There is, however, one exception. And if you sell your products in supermarkets, we've got good news for you! 😎
→ When you equip yourself with Sidely CRM, you'll have access to all the supermarket outlets you're targeting right from your first connection.
CRM is implemented with an up-to-date database of pre-qualified establishments. It's up to you to complete and enrich this database with your own information (current sales, assigned area manager, existing distributor, etc.) to make it your own.
This little revolution in the world of CRM gives you a major competitive edge. With a geolocalized database of your prospects and customers, you can optimize your sales rounds!
What's more, you can draw on our survey forms designed to facilitate the feedback of field information into your CRM database. Assortment, number of facings, digital holdings, point-of-sale displays, number of events sold, etc. We've thought of everything!
So there's no need to customize your CRM settings, since we've already thought of everything that CPG brands need to manage their performance!
Your CRM database is an asset as precious as it is strategic, and guaranteeing its proper functioning and integrity means setting up a maintenance and update protocol.
As a general rule, the CRM publisher (or integrator) is responsible for the scalability of the software's functionalities and for the appropriate documentation.
It's up to you to take care of all the other aspects of the CRM database:
💡 Customer and prospect data degrades very quickly. It's essential to carry out recurring updates to prevent your data from becoming obsolete, and thus avoid wasting your sales and marketing resources. In addition, be sure to implement protocols that prevent the creation of duplicates.
The proper management of a CRM database also depends on its legal compliance with the RGPD (General Data Protection Regulation), which aims to protect the rights of individuals.
The RGPD includes various measures to be integrated into the administration of your crm database:
These practices guarantee the protection of individuals' rights and the legal compliance of the CRM base. To delve deeper into the subject, discover everything you need to know about CRM compliance with the RGPD.
To improve their sales and marketing performance, companies are looking to analyze their CRM databases. AI and CRM-integrated reporting modules serve this purpose, but it's often necessary to call in data analysts to take the analysis a step further.
The aim is to extract insights that enable sales and marketing strategies to be redirected. Here are just a few examples of the objectives generally pursued by companies when it comes to CRM databases.
As a general rule, these data analyses are carried out in the following stages.
Historical development
And for the curious, we end on a note of history!
Sales databases were first introduced to facilitate information feedback, at a time when travelling salespeople were beginning to adopt IT.
With the rise of the web, digital marketing and e-commerce, CRM has become a central tool for customer acquisition and retention. The evolution of customer relationship management (CRM) and the automation of sales and marketing tasks have reinforced the role of databases, which are now the backbone of companies' sales activities.
More recently, big data and artificial intelligence (AI) have further increased the power of information systems, enabling more efficient, automated and personalized customer interactions. The list of fields of action is impressive and growing all the time:
