What is CRM? | CRM 101 | Most Complete Non-Tech Introduction to CRM

When I first sat down to write this, I pictured someone just starting out, trying to make sense of CRM from scratch. And honestly, that’s how most people think of customer relationship management (CRM)—software to organize contacts and maybe manage a few deals.

But the more I wrote, the more I realized: there’s so much more here. Even people who’ve been around CRM tools for years often miss what makes them powerful.

So here’s the deal: this isn’t your typical “What is CRM software?” article. No endless definitions or checklists of features. We’re skipping the fluff and getting straight to the knowledge I wish I’d had from day one.

My goal is to show you what CRM software actually does for medium and small businesses—how it can be the backbone of your customer relationships and your business growth.

Think of this as your crash course in CRM tools, but with a twist. We’ll dig into the essentials, the stuff that doesn’t change, that actually makes CRM valuable whether you’re new or experienced. If you’re ready, let’s dive in and make sense of customer relationship management (CRM together)—one step at a time.

What Is This Not About

Before writing this article, I googled the question, and I found tons of materials that answer the question in Wikipedia style. They give you information, but I want to give you knowledge. 

Because of that I will not go into definitions, I will not give you types of CRM systems (though I’ll mention two categories). I won’t mention the benefits of cloud-based CRM or key features, and I won’t give you any advice on which CRM system to choose. This is not my goal. 

My goal is to equip you with the knowledge I wish I had when I just started in the industry. Something that others are not talking about. 

This article is your non-technical introduction to the world of CRM systems. 

After reading this article, you should have everything you need to know to guide your research and hopefully, save you a lot of time and money during implementation. Enjoy.

Laws of Physics

What is CRM? I asked my manager in the small Dutch CRM consulting firm where I worked a few years ago. That ended in an almost hour-long discussion. 

I vividly remember the emotions of that day. I walked away from the meeting with a heavy heart and an even heavier mind.

The reason why answering this simple question is so difficult is because a customer relationship management system has become so much more than just an Account and Contact management tool. 

It became the business’s operating system, which is what makes this topic so challenging for newcomers—it’s incredibly deep and varied.

But the good news is, as with most other topics, there are some evergreen areas that don’t change. There are fundamentals that, if taught right, can guide a manager or entrepreneur in the right direction. 

Jeff Bezos once said “I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ … I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’”

Sell more and serve customers better—all smarter and more cost-effectively than the competition. That’s the core value of any CRM system. This principle hasn’t changed, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon. It’s as fundamental as a law of physics. The effectiveness of a CRM system often hinges on its ability to manage and optimize the sales funnel, guiding potential customers from initial interest through to conversion.

Keeping Up

I wouldn’t be a messiah if I told you that technology has gone a very long way in the last twenty years. But It didn’t become advanced overnight. It took years of iterations, failures and mistakes.

The challenge to the modern company is to keep up with the technology. But what is even harder to keep up is to jump in that technological train. 
Let me explain. CRM technology has become so advanced and complex that even understanding its capabilities is a huge challenge. The sheer volume of features and options is overwhelming, and it’s difficult to find anyone with a comprehensive understanding of the whole system.

In the early days, adopting new technology was simpler. Early versions had fewer features, so businesses didn’t need to make major changes or invest heavily in training. Technology at that stage wasn’t disruptive – it enhanced existing sales processes in small, manageable ways. 

Today, however, each CRM platform is packed with so many specialized tools and functionalities that even industry experts tend to focus on narrow areas. 

Some specialize in sales, others in customer service, and even within those areas, experts may focus on specific tasks like lead management, data entry, marketing automation, or quote-to-cash processes. This fragmentation makes it hard to find a single source of guidance, especially for a business manager or entrepreneur who needs a high-level overview.

If you’re trying to get started with a CRM solution today, you’re probably wondering, “Where do I even begin?” There’s so much to learn, but no one person has all the answers. The technology has outpaced the collective knowledge available, leaving newcomers struggling to figure out what’s possible, let alone how to implement it.

But there’s a simple, inexpensive solution.

This approach has worked for tens of thousands of companies, yet surprisingly, many still overlook it. It’s a low-tech strategy that helps make CRM adoption manageable, no matter how advanced the technology has become.

Imagine starting a CRM implementation back in the 2000s, when these systems were still in their infancy. Back then, there weren’t many features or options – you would just follow the natural progression, one step at a time.

Today, jumping into a customer relationship management system is harder than ever. Features, tools, and technologies. It’s overwhelming, and it’s hard to know which options will actually benefit your company in terms of sales marketing.

But I have some good news! You can recreate that early-stage simplicity by taking the same incremental approach. Pretend you’re starting in the 2000s. Start small. Implement just a few features at a time. Let your CRM evolve gradually as if the technology itself is still in its early days.

I’ll explain this approach in more detail later in this article. It’s probably the single most important thing to understand about CRM adoption. 

This gradual approach is your insurance – it helps ensure you won’t fail. That said, you should be prepared to encounter some short-term setbacks while you’re finding your way. But in the long run, this strategy will set you up for success in your sales marketing efforts.

Now, let’s move on.

CRM vs ERP

To understand what customer relationship management is, I first recommend exploring why it emerged in the market. 

There are two main types of corporate software: ERP and CRM.

If you’re not familiar with ERP, think of it this way: at its simplest, ERP is accounting software. But at its most complex, it serves as a central hub for business operations – covering everything from accounting to warehousing, employee management, and more.

ERP is a software that supports business operations. Its name says it all. It stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. You plan and manage your resources. Most important resource? Money. Everything you have in ERP translates to money on your balance sheet. 

ERP is not always called ERP. Sometimes, it’s just invoicing software, quoting software or other similar software. But for the sake of simplicity and education, I’ll use the term ERP.

The Origins of ERP Systems

ERP systems emerged as soon as computers reached corporations. While early versions were quite basic, their core purpose has remained the same to this day: these systems are designed to capture and record what has happened within the business.

Issuing invoices, ensuring payments are received on time, managing warehouse stock, calculating payroll, and so on.

But there’s one limitation with ERP and similar systems. It’s the reason software engineers and business managers joined forces and decided that ERP alone was no longer enough.

The issue with ERP lies in its timing.

ERP systems store historical data. For example, when you create an invoice, after you’ve done a sale, you are reflecting a past event. 

Once something is entered into the system, it’s challenging to remove or alter that record. In the case of an invoice, you’d have to void it to remove it, which would still impact the P&L statement because it appears as accounts payable.

See where I’m going? There was a need for a solution that would allow it to be more flexible. Something that would operate in less strict terms than ERP. 

This is how CRM systems were born. 

The Distinctive Focus of ERP and CRM Systems

Consider this: in the best case, a business might close one opportunity out of ten, which is a respectable conversion rate. Now imagine if every time sales reps identified opportunities, it resulted in creating invoices.

Your business would become hard to manage. You would have to cancel a lot of invoices, and at some point, this would become suspicious to tax authorities. 

Cloud-based CRM is the solution to this problem. It allows you to manage customer data effectively, creating opportunities and nurturing leads long before they are ready to be entered into an ERP system. CRM tools not only support meaningful customer relationships but also enhance sales forecasting and enable marketing automation, helping sales reps focus on conversion efforts with better insights into each prospect.

Transactions vs. Records

Imagine you’re at a trade fair, meeting potential clients, and collecting business cards from visitors at your stand. After the fair, you follow up by calling each one. 

In CRM terms, you’ve gathered a set of sales leads that will enter the sales pipeline and move through various stages of the sales process, where you’ll qualify and identify which ones may lead to real business. This entire process encompasses the sales cycle, tracking each step from initial contact to potential conversion.

Now, consider a different scenario. An existing customer calls you, asking for a new product or service. You sit at your desk, prepare a quote, and send it over. 

In CRM language, you’ve just created an opportunity—a potential deal within the customer journey that could lead to revenue if it closes successfully.

In both situations, you’re not guaranteed to close the sale. But if you do, that’s when you’ll create an invoice and move the record into ERP.

This difference is key: ERP systems handle transactions—each transaction impacts the organization’s records, potentially affecting financial reports or triggering other actions. 

CRM system, on the other hand, works with records that don’t impact your bottom line directly unless customized to do so.

The value of CRM lies in reporting, analyzing, and managing these records to help you track leads, opportunities, and customer interactions. 

ERP’s value, however, is in capturing the transactional impact across the organization, helping maintain financial integrity and operational accuracy.

As technology evolves, the lines between the two are fading, making it sometimes difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.

What CRM System Looks Today

So, what is customer relationship management (CRM)? 

Nowadays, it has a lot of different forms and shapes. 

When I only started my career, CRM systems were just complex notebooks to store contact information and information about potential businesses, like leads, opportunities, and quotes. 

Some had slightly more advanced features, like click-to-call, but for the most part, they were basic.

Today, a CRM solution could be anything. It could be your complex quoting tool, it could be place to process all your orders, it could even store your invoices.

Storing invoices? But this is ERP functionality? Yes. It is.

I’ve already told you that the borders between the two are fading, and that’s one of the examples. 

You wouldn’t be wrong asking, “But how do I know if I’m looking for a CRM system or ERP”?

And that’s a great question. A question that doesn’t have the answer. It all depends. But I’ll give it a try and answer it. 

There are generally two directions a company can take to satisfy its digital needs. 

Micro-Services

The first approach involves using a separate app for each specific task: one tool for invoicing, another for tracking opportunities, another for managing expenses, and so on. This approach allows small companies to handle the entire customer journey using only the most essential tools.

Take invoicing, for example. At Muncly, as a small consultancy firm, we don’t rely on complex accounting software. Instead, we use software to send invoices to our target customers, track whether they’re paid on time, and send reminders if a payment is overdue.

For lead tracking and contact management, we use Salesforce, which supports our sales team in managing interactions across the customer lifecycle. Our Salesforce implementation service ensures the platform is set up and optimized to meet specific business needs, enabling seamless integration and enhanced efficiency. To log billable hours, we use the Harvest app.

For each specific need, we use a standalone app. This approach works for us as a small company, allowing marketing departments and customer service teams to use specialized tools without getting bogged down by large, complex systems.

When it comes to invoicing, we look for an app that’s straightforward and focused solely on invoicing. We don’t have the budget to customize complex software, and frankly, there’s no business justification for it.

But there’s a tradeoff. We don’t have a single place where all our business transactions are visible. If a payment is overdue on an invoice, our CRM system wouldn’t be aware of it. This can impact customer engagement since someone might offer new services to a client without knowing there’s an outstanding payment.

So, theoretically, someone working with the customer with an overdue invoice might offer new services without knowing there’s an outstanding payment. But we’re okay with that. Do you know why?

Because we’re a small company, and everyone knows each client’s customer data. It’s simply impossible for someone to work with one of my clients without me being aware of it. And vice versa – I couldn’t contact someone’s client silently without the Account owner knowing that. 

We use almost 30 different apps daily. Some of them are integrated with each other, supporting our sales and marketing efforts, while others aren’t. And, honestly, we’re happy with this setup.

However, It would be cheaper for us to have one platform where we could do everything, including data entry. We wouldn’t need to pay for 30 different services. Such a platform could also help automate repetitive tasks, streamlining our workflow.

Yet such implementation would require a ton of our resources. We can hire consultants, we could hire developers. But someone would have to tell them what to do. 

So, we chose this setup. And such a setup actually has a name. It’s called micro-service architecture. 

Well, to be completely honest, it’s not the official name. I just took the name of the approach from the development world, but it fits really well here.

It’s a type of architecture where a company uses a distinct set of apps, each doing a narrow set of tasks while maintaining clear access to customer information across the board.

Monolith

The second approach is to build a single, integrated system that handles most, if not all, complete and repetitive tasks in one place, helping both sales and marketing teams streamline the sales cycle and improve customer satisfaction.

Imagine this: someone from your sales team receives a quote request from a client, and they’re ready to move forward with a new deal. But behind the scenes, there’s an unresolved issue with a previous order. 

Only the customer support teams are aware of this problem—they’ve been handling the client’s complaint and managing the open support ticket, but this information hasn’t been communicated to the sales and marketing teams. 

This disconnect creates an inter-department issue that could potentially harm customer satisfaction if the unresolved problem resurfaces. Without insight into the ongoing support problem, your sales team rep could proceed with the quote request, potentially damaging the client relationship if the unresolved issue surfaces later.

With a monolith system, however, you can set up business rules that connect the sales process and customer support activities seamlessly. 

For example, if there’s an outstanding support ticket on a client account, a rule could be triggered to automatically notify both sales teams and management, ensuring everyone is aware of the situation. 

The quote request might even be temporarily flagged or escalated to management, who can then review the situation and decide on the best approach to improve customer satisfaction.

This level of cross-departmental integration, made possible by a robust CRM system, reduces miscommunication, enhances the marketing process, and ultimately improves the customer experience.

Now, let’s move away from the technology and talk more about the business side of CRM systems. 

CRM as a Strategy, Not Just Software

Let’s put this into perspective. When you want to cook a new dish, what do you do? You grab your recipe book, find the instructions, and follow each step. Simple, right?

What role does the recipe book play here? It’s a tool, it’s an instruction. It provides the information you need, but it’s up to you to prepare the meal.

Would you expect the recipe book to cook the dish for you? Of course not. That’s a rhetorical question.

The same logic applies to customer relationship management (CRM). CRM is software – it can’t do the work for you. It’s a tool, plain and simple. But it wasn’t always viewed this way.

When I say this, I mean that CRM wasn’t always just considered a tool. In fact, the term itself originally had a different meaning, one that’s largely been forgotten over time. Until Today. It’s time to remember what CRM stands for.

The Rise of Cloud CRM

The concept of customer relationship management (though not explicitly called CRM) existed in practice long before it became a technology-driven term. 

For decades, businesses recognized the value of building strong, loyal customer relationships with their existing and new customers, which often meant focusing on personalized customer experience, attentive phone calls, and loyalty-building strategies that were not tied to databases or software.

In the pre-digital era, businesses cultivated customer relationships through personal interactions, record-keeping on paper, and direct customer engagement. 

This focus on relationship-building could be seen in small, family-run businesses and large enterprises alike, where customer loyalty was driven by service quality, personal rapport, and trust.

The shift from this people-focused approach to the technology-centered CRM systems as we know them happened in the 1980s and 1990s. As cloud computing and databases emerged, businesses could manage larger volumes of customer information more efficiently. This evolution allowed companies to track purchase history, maintain records of customer interactions, and even predict future market trends.

With the rise of cloud CRM, businesses could leverage marketing automation capabilities and connect CRM systems directly to their sales teams and marketing campaigns. Over time, companies like Oracle, SAP, Siebel, and Salesforce promoted the term customer relationship management as it became synonymous with software solutions.

Years of their targeted marketing campaigns were so successful that customer relationship management effectively became a term that is used only in the context of software solutions. As if it is detached from the business strategy. But it shouldn’t.

CRM Is a Strategy

CRM is your strategy. It’s your way of selling, serving and making your clients happy. It doesn’t matter if you are in Business-to-Business (B2B), E-commerce, Business-to-Consumer (B2C), or even Business-to-Government (B2G). 

You already have your ways of working, and your clients love you for that. Your strategy is making way for your company to the market, managing customer relationships, enhancing customer experience, retaining your customers, and helping you attract new business.

CRM as software should be used as a way to scale your existing customer strategy and give you abilities in your customer strategy that earlier were not available to you. 

Think of CRM software as similar to a camera: buying a new, high-tech camera won’t make you a photographer. 

Just the Opposite. Without skills your pictures on you iPhone will look better than those taken with professional camera. 

Likewise, simply adding CRM software won’t solve mismanagement issues or automatically improve customer communications. 

CRM software is most effective when paired with a clear, customer-focused strategy that guides its use. 

Alignment of customer strategy and software allows your business to leverage technology to enhance customer engagement, build customer loyalty, and utilize predictive analytics to retain and attract potential customers effectively. It enables you to manage all customer interactions, track purchase history, and streamline your sales and marketing efforts, much like a skilled photographer making a product in a picture look better than in real life.

Customer Relationship Management Fundamentals

Now that I’ve covered how CRM looks and that you know it’s a strategy, I want to share one piece of knowledge that would help you look at CRM from a completely different angle.

What I’m going to tell you next is an oversimplification in a sense. But it gives you the level of abstraction that could enable you to look at systems that are on the market through your own prism. 

It’s important that you look at the systems on the market as a look-alike. Why I’m saying that? Because they are look alike, yet marketers are doing a great job differentiating them. 

My goal is to remove marketing fluff and give you a tool that you could use to clear your signal and allow you to have a more…sober look at the market. 

Introduction to Data

I’ve promised that I’m not going into technical details in this article. And I wouldn’t. I will give you four new words to your vocabulary that would increase your awareness by orders of magnitude. 

Every CRM. I mean EVERY CRM in the world works on the same basic principles. It stores data, grants you ergonomic access to it through well-designed screens and enables you to report it. 

No matter how sophisticated or how simple is the CRM, it will use these four pillars:

• Fields
• Entities (or Objects)
• Relations
• Records

Let’s talk about all of them separately

Fields

Fields are just like Excel cells. You can name your column “First Name”, and all the cells below in the same column should contain First Names. You could name it “Phone Number,” and all cells in the column below will contain phone numbers. 

The only difference with Excel is that CRM stores all the data in a specific format. If the field should contain a number, it will not allow you to store the name in it. Because it’s a database, you can only store CRM data in specific field types.

There is a limited number of types of fields, but the combination of different types of fields makes up – Entities!

Entities

So now you have fields that should be part of something. For example, if you want to store contact details, how do you know that fields are related to contacts? 

You would group them by Entities. Some CRM vendors like Salesforce call it Objects, but it doesn’t matter. 

Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, Quotes – these all are entities. They all have different sets of fields under them. This is how you organize your CRM data in the system so that you can differentiate between different types of data.

Relations

Next. CRM platform allows you linking Objects with each other. 

Imagine you want to store Orders. How do you know Orders are linked to specific Clients? You create a relation with Client entity. (In CRM, usually, a client is represented with an Account entity. So, I’ll use Accounts to relate to Clients).

Relations, often, are just another field on the screen. They look very similar to other fields, the only difference is that you will choose from the list of existing records that are stored in different object. 

Records

Finally, when you know that there are Fields, Entities and Relations, it’s time to learn about Records. 

Fields, Entities and Relations together create the so-called “Data Model”. It’s a skeleton of your information system, your customer database. Yet you still need to fill the system with customer information. 

To fill the system with information, you create records. Every time you create a new client, you create an Account record.

Every time you want to register a business opportunity, you create an Opportunity record and link it to an Account record, ensuring that all relevant customer data is associated with that opportunity.

You type in all the necessary information about Opportunity in various fields; for example, you type in Amount in the currency field, Close Date in the Date field, and you select existing Account record to fill in the “Account” field. 

Additionally, you can also create records for potential customers, allowing you to track interactions and opportunities for future business while gathering valuable customer data.

Now, you can create reports. And thanks to relations, you can make those reports sophisticated. You can pull all Accounts with Won opportunities for the last 6 months, for example. Or you could pull out all Accounts that bought certain products. 

Implementation

Now it’s time to get your hands dirty. It’s time to touch on some practicalities. 

There are two main pillars that I want you to learn. These are two pillars that, unfortunately, lead to massive failure rates.

As a matter of fact, 80% of CRM fails. Sometimes even more. And these are not my words. It’s a result of many studies. And that pretty much aligns with my observations.

But I have some good news. There are a few very simple things you can do to increase your chances for success by orders of magnitude. 

Standardization

And the first thing is Standardisation. 

If you want your CRM software implementation to succeed, you will have to standardise your business processes.

That means you will likely have to sacrifice some of the ways in which you are working with your clients. 

The thing is – we are all humans, and we all have our own ways of dealing with clients, even if we work for the same company. 

Every employee is doing it slightly differently, you will have to standartize your way of working with clients by finding the right combination of Entities, Fields and Relations that best describe your relations with clients.

For example, every customer will have a description in the system that would describe him. It will have a Name. At least. Ideally, you would want to segment your clients by the number of employees or industry. Or the type of product they are buying. 

In any case, you want to know more about each of your Accounts and the customer data associated with them.

Actually, you do that unconsciously. You know a lot about your client already. It just happens in an unstructured way. It happens in your mind or your employees mind. 

When implementing CRM, you will have to put all that customer data on paper and later translate this into a set of Entities, Fields and Relations so that when you are creating records, you will store all the right information that is relevant to your clients. 

And here is something I wish never happened to anyone. A lot of companies, and unfortunately, a lot of my clients, are making the same mistake. In part, I’m writing this article to persuade some of my clients not to do it.

What is happening is that a lot of companies approach CRM implementation projects in the wrong way by trying to implement them all at once.

Structuring your existing business is no walk in the park. How you think the business should be structured may be different from what your employees in the field think. And you both may be wrong…you have to test your hypothesis and align your knowledge with real market structure.

To align that knowledge, you need time! 

To give yourself time, you have to find your CRM implementation pace. Some companies are capable of “consuming” large and complex systems fairly quickly. Others need more time to learn. 

Very few companies, like Amazon or Google, are capable of massive digital transformation fairly quickly. However, most main street businesses are not capable of “digesting” large and complex systems. We have to go small.

Start small. Start slow. Find your own pace, and make sure your customer data is structured and accessible.

Agile

Next. It’s something that is a direct result of my previous point. 

To implement CRM, you have to learn a very important skill. It’s called agility, or I’d better say the ability to iterate.

There is a simple recipe for any CRM implementation. Big or small. Just make sure you implement it right.

1. First, define the absolute minimum that would be enough to launch. It’s called MVP (minimum viable product). Make it as small as possible. Ideally, at the launch, you should be tracking a maximum of 7-10 fields (depends on your process, of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all recipe, but keep it ultra-lean, focusing on the essential customer data)
2. Second. Implement routines. Make what you have implemented your everyday. Track the progress of what you’ve just implemented. Make use of the product for a couple of months.
3. Three. Create a backlog. It’s a list of features or changes based on your knowledge after owning CRM for some time. Apply the same principle as in the first point – make it as lean as possible. Don’t be afraid to go to extremes here. You would only benefit from a streamlined approach that emphasizes the most relevant customer data.
4. Four. Repeat.

Simple as that, yet surprisingly hard to implement. 

Choosing CRM

Finally. Let’s touch a topic of choosing CRM software. 

It’s probably the hardest of all the questions. I’ve made my choice many years ago. I have doubted it many times, but I’ve never regretted it. I’m giving my vote for Salesforce. 

I’m not saying it’s the best software. I’m also not saying that I will not change my opinion over time. Technology industry is very rapidly evolving, and I’m sure there will be or maybe already is a product that I’m not aware of, that is more universal, easier and potentially cheaper.

In any case, there are around 3000 CRM solutions on the market, and each one of them has its place in certain scenarios. But there are two large, non-scientific categories in which those CRM systems could be grouped, and I want to share them with you.

There are platforms that could, theoretically, cover the whole business. And there are specialised CRM tools.

So, Platform CRMs, that are universal. And specialised tools that cover specific industries or use cases.

I’ve already touched on approaches like micro-service versus monolith. This is another way of looking at the same problem.

Platform CRM

Platforms are like Lego blocks. CRM examples include Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Oracle and SAP. 

Let’s start with the pros of Platforms.

1. Versatility. Ability to use one system for all the processes and potentially cover your whole business with one tool.
2. License costs. Or less licences to purchase. If your process is sophisticated, you may save a lot of money on licensing. In theory. 
3. Expert Availability. Bigger pool of professionals who know platforms, so it will be easier to hire a consultant or developer who could guide you through the platforms. 

Now, let’s go through the cons.

1. Longer implementation. Platforms are almost always more complicated, which translates into longer implementation cycles.
2. Steep learning curve. With platforms, flexibility is powerful but requires careful planning. Unlike smaller systems that limit customization, platforms demand clear design from the start to avoid costly missteps. It’s like building a custom house vs. buying a pre-built one: the custom option offers freedom, but only if it is well-designed from the beginning.
3. Costly implementation. While you can save a lot on licenses, you may be required to hire expensive specialists to implement the system.

Niche CRM

Niche CRM solutions are specialized tools designed for specific industries, like outreach, videography, legal, plumbing, construction, etc. They come with built-in processes tailored to these fields.

Let’s start with the pros of Niche CRMs.

1. Quick and inexpensive. Ready-made processes mean faster and cheaper implementations. You don’t need specialized knowledge, and you can start using CRM literally within weeks or even days of the purchase.
2. Follows best practices. Often you could even learn how other companies in your industry or niche work by applying standard processes in the niche CRM.
3. Quick adoption. Such systems tend to have more simple user interface that allows for quicker training of users, sometimes they’re so intuitive that learning is not even necessary.

Now, let’s go through the cons.

1. Limited customization, which may become restrictive as your business grows or if you deliver unique services. Even though.
2. Companies often outgrow these systems, moving to platforms that can support their expanding needs and unique processes.

Hybrid CRM Software

Finally I have to touch a Hybrid setup. It’s when a niche CRM is built on platforms like Salesforce, blending the best and worst of both worlds.

These systems offer out-of-the-box functionality typical of niche solutions but are built within a larger ecosystem. The most common platform for these hybrid CRMs is Salesforce, where solution providers develop industry-specific tools within its environment.

Let’s start with the pros of Hybrid CRM solutions.

1. Flexible, yet ready to use. Combines ready-made industry processes with the flexibility of a platform.
2. Future proof. Secures you from the necessity to migrate to the platform CRM in the future while enabling you to use pre-built features.

Now, let’s go through the cons.

1. Licensing cost. Requires dual licensing — one from the solution provider and one from the platform (e.g., Salesforce).
2. Complexity. Inherits complexity from both niche systems and platforms, which may increase setup time and costs.

Which one do I recommend? None – it all depends on your business, your industry, your digital maturity, the number of employees, your business process, and so much more.

Final Word

Wow, thanks for reading so far. I did my best to immerse you in the world of customer relationship management with simple words. I hope I succeeded. But you are the judge. 

Let’s quickly summarize: 

• CRM is strategy, not just software – Think of CRM like a shovel: it’s a tool, but it won’t dig for you. The success comes from how you wield it.
• Embrace iteration and expect some failures – CRM implementation thrives on an iterative approach. Small missteps are part of the process, helping you refine as you go.
• There’s no one-size-fits-all CRM – Every business is unique. No “perfect” CRM exists that fits everyone, so choose a solution that aligns with your specific needs.

An effective CRM can streamline your sales pipeline, helping you manage leads and opportunities more efficiently while enhancing customer retention strategies to keep your clients satisfied and engaged.

Do you want to talk about a specific project, your sales productivity, or just need a pair of understanding ears? Leave your details in my contact form, and I’ll reach out. 

Oh, don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter for insights, and let’s connect on LinkedIn—I’d love to stay in touch!

Cheers, 
J.