Enhances customer relationships
CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management, a software solution whose main purpose is to improve existing customer relationships and make initiating new ones easier. A CRM system assists with several different things, such as customer prospecting, sales, and marketing strategies, and creating flexible customer support solutions.
Companies that use CRM systems can benefit a lot from having aggregated customer information, for instance. The value of this speaks for itself; having all necessary customer data in one place makes the overall workflow more frictionless, which entails higher customer satisfaction. Moreover, a CRM system provides sales statistics and forecasts and contributes insights regarding important key figures and KPIs.
Software as a service
Companies providing CRM systems usually receive their revenue through subscriptions, also known as the Software as a Service business model. The two most well-known CRM providers worldwide are Microsoft and Salesforce, and the latter also happens to have $CRM as a stock ticker. Salesforce has proven that CRM systems are incredibly useful, as they have managed to attract over 150,000 clients.
Operating Leverage
What's extra forceful regarding CRM and software, in general, is the attribute of being able to scale up sales rapidly with low marginal costs attached—as software providers are not dependent on suppliers or production capacity. Other examples of prominent CRM companies are HubSpot, Oracle, SAP, and Zendesk—all having market capitalizations of over $10 billion—which indicates that CRM software is here to stay.