What is CRM? CRM systems explained

A CRM solves a problem you only see when someone leaves. A salesperson walks out with their inbox, their notes and their memory, and with them the quotes that still needed chasing. The idea started as a digital card index in the 1980s, grew into large sales systems in the 1990s, and since Salesforce launched in 1999 it has mostly been a subscription per user in the cloud.

Inside, everything hangs off a record per company and per contact: quotes, deals with their stage, calls, emails and tasks such as "call back Tuesday". Most packages show deals as a board with columns, so you can see how much sits in each stage and what has stalled.

Signs a spreadsheet is no longer enough

• More than one person follows up customers, and nobody knows who promised what.
• Quotes go unanswered because nobody owns the follow-up.
• You cannot say how many enquiries came in last month, or how many signed.
• Your customer list exists in three versions. How to get out of that is covered in replacing Excel with software.

A CRM is strongest when it is connected: an enquiry on your website becomes a deal on its own, a signed quote becomes an invoice. Without those links someone retypes everything; with an API integration it simply happens.

What a team of eight pays

The figure works it out for eight users over 36 months, at euro list prices with annual billing. Salesforce Starter Suite at €25 a user a month comes to 8 x 25 x 36 = €7,200. Pipedrive Growth at €39 comes to €11,232. Salesforce Pro Suite at €100, the level where most growing sales teams end up, comes to €28,800. Those are licences only: implementation, data migration, training and paid add-ons come on top, and in larger rollouts they often exceed the licences.

Start with a package unless your process is genuinely different: it is cheap to begin with and forces you to put your sales in order. How a CRM differs from the system that runs the rest of the business is set out in CRM vs ERP and under ERP.

Where your customer data lives

Names, email addresses and phone numbers of contacts are personal data under the GDPR, and so are notes about them. If you sell into the EU, check where your CRM stores data and on what legal basis it leaves the European Economic Area: most American vendors rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework of July 2023, others offer EU data centres. Keep only what you need, mention it in your privacy notice, and sign a data processing agreement with the vendor.

A client record built around one profession

Custom pays off when clients need to log in, when the CRM has to merge with scheduling or administration, or when your trade has data no package expects. For Business Centrum, a payroll bureau in Ghent, we built a management platform that replaces their spreadsheet: per employer a record with its employees, tasks, documents and a log of who changed what, and a client portal where the client sees what they still need to supply. We tested it on their real spreadsheet with 309 employers and 971 employees.