Common questions about Customer Relationship Management, answered.
What is customer relationship management (CRM)?▾
Customer relationship management refers both to the strategy of managing a company's relationships and interactions with customers and prospects, and to the software systems (CRMs) that store and organize that data. A CRM centralizes contact information, interaction history, deals, and activity so teams can manage relationships, coordinate sales and marketing, and use customer data to serve and grow accounts.
What does a CRM system do?▾
It stores and organizes customer and prospect data — contact details, interaction and purchase history, deal/pipeline status, communications — in one place, and supports sales, marketing, and service workflows: tracking leads and deals, logging interactions, segmenting contacts, triggering follow-ups, and reporting. It's the system of record for customer relationships and a key source of first-party data for marketing.
How does CRM power marketing?▾
By supplying the first-party data and segmentation that drive targeted, personalized marketing: building custom audiences and lookalikes from customer lists, tailoring messaging by segment and lifecycle stage, triggering lifecycle and nurture campaigns, and measuring marketing's impact on pipeline and revenue. A well-maintained CRM is the backbone for aligning marketing with sales and for data-driven, relationship-based marketing.
What's the difference between a CRM and a CDP?▾
A CRM centers on managing known customer/prospect relationships and sales/service workflows, with structured contact and deal data, often oriented to sales teams. A customer data platform (CDP) unifies customer data from many sources (including behavioral and anonymous) into comprehensive profiles built for marketing activation and personalization at scale. CRMs manage relationships and pipeline; CDPs unify all customer data for marketing. They overlap and often integrate.
Why is CRM important for advertising?▾
Because it holds the first-party data that's increasingly central to advertising as third-party tracking declines. CRM data feeds custom and lookalike audiences, enables suppression of existing customers from prospecting, powers lifecycle and retention campaigns, and improves measurement by connecting ad-driven leads to actual revenue. A clean, well-integrated CRM turns customer relationships into an advertising asset and a measurement source.
