Customer relationship management (CRM) software centralizes customer data.

Leveraging its use provides a real-time, single source of truth to foster close client relationships and drive business outcomes.

These are essential components of delivering seamless, omnichannel experiences for sales environments.

These days, B2B customers use 10 or more channels to communicate with suppliers and make purchases, according to research by McKinsey & Company.

Let’s look at CRM software and how it can help you make the most of your customer data.

What is CRM software — and do you need one?

CRM software is a platform that aggregates all customer data in one place.

Typically, a CRM:

• Acts as a central hub that can be accessed by all teams and departments and updated in real-time.
• Allows everyone to work together seamlessly — helping your team build long-term relationships, identify strategic sales opportunities, and above all provide an outstanding customer experience.
• Reduces customer churn and maintains steady subscription renewal rates (for example, SaaS-based companies) by shifting the focus from transactions to relationships.

It’s hardly surprising: customer-centric companies (putting the customer first) are positioned to grow their revenues faster and reap higher profits compared to businesses that aren’t putting their customers first.

Complex relationships are the norm nowadays, and customers expect companies to know them and, more important, understand them, using a personalized approach based on past interactions.

This is only possible if you track all CX and sales processes automatically, and can access them instantly in the future.

In fact, the shift to omnichannel sales — where customers use different channels to research products, communicate with companies, and buy — means that companies need powerful, real-time data management tools to navigate relationships in order to keep up and remain competitive.

CRM software does exactly that — it enables you to provide a seamless customer experience across each medium, and does so by putting your customers first, providing the possibility to personalize your messaging at scale.

Put your customers first, work seamlessly with all teams, and manage complex customer data

Let’s now look at all the main benefits of CRM software, to see how it can help you achieve more and drive the results you’re after.

CRM software enables you to:

1. Redefine the way you manage your customer relationships

Relationship selling is much more efficient compared to traditional sales approaches, and CRM helps specifically highlight that objective: build and enhance relationships.

In the traditional sales approach, a sales rep makes a sales pitch and then works through the prospect’s objections.

Using this method, the relationship usually ends right there, with or without a sale.

Relationship selling, on the other hand, means that you consistently put your customers’ needs first and strive to create meaningful relationships based on understanding and connection — and provide value beyond the sale.

Aside from the increase in customer satisfaction, relationship selling is tied to better customer loyalty and sales performance.

CRM software is the tool that enables you to build these relationships, and do that at scale, without being limited to the columns of an Excel sheet — or, even worse, to your memory.

With the right CRM product in your arsenal, you can consistently provide excellent service by checking all customer data before each interaction (or during interactions, when you’re dealing with an inbound request), and know exactly where your customer stands, what their needs are, and what past objections they had.

This way, you’re also able to foresee possible frustrations and manage them proactively, as well as identify disengaged customers and look for ways to bring them back.

2. Have a global overview by connecting data from all your systems

By integrating your CRM with other apps, you can centralize your data and make sure it flows easily between all the BI tools you’re using.

This enables you to have a comprehensive overview of each customer relationship and of your entire customer base — in fact, over 22,000 PandaDoc accounts currently benefit from CRM integrations to manage contracts, proposals, and instantly check the status of all docs waiting to be signed.

On an individual level, having the timeline of each relationship before your eyes, along with key interactions, helps you strengthen the connection with each customer and provide a tailored, personalized service.

On a global level, armed with the data on all your customer relationships, you’ll be able to identify:

• High-potential relationships that haven’t reached maturity yet, and then reach out to those customers to deepen the relationship and bring it to the next stage
• Issues that might turn relationships sour down the line, addressing them before they do — and before they lead to customer churn
• Nearly closed deals where you might need one extra call to get your lead to convert
• Opportunities to rekindle relationships with inactive customers, to check in with them and make sure they have all the information they need to make the most of their subscription

3. Shorten the sales cycle

One of the best ways to shorten the sales cycle is to frequently touch base with your hottest leads, and not let them cool down and run to one of your competitors — while also maintaining a relationship with leads that are lukewarm but still show some potential to convert.

For this, you need a global overview of all your leads and to know the stage of the sales cycle where each one currently is.

Another benefit of CRM tools is that they enable you to regularly clean your lists of cold leads, redirecting any time and effort you’d spend with them to other leads who have a higher potential.

And one more way to speed things up: a CRM makes it easier for your leads to sign contracts, regardless of the device or channel they’re using.

4. Use a personalized approach at scale

Automation allows you to get tailored messaging out at scale.

Recurrent interactions are much easier to manage with a CRM tool, and you’ll be far better prepared to personalize your message if you have all customer data at your fingertips at all times.

Email is one of the best ways to personalize your messaging, but it can also be a productivity drain for salespeople — in fact, professionals check their email 15 times per day on average.

A CRM platform helps you optimize by:

• Storing all relevant information together
• Automating follow-ups
• Keeping track of all customer interactions

Automation is one of the best ways to personalize interactions while still staying efficient, and most CRM systems offer exactly that.

They help you automate repetitive tasks, look up data, and use it in the best way possible to provide customized service.

For CRM automation to be successful you need to make sure all tools from your tech stack are well-connected with each other, ensuring that your data flows smoothly.

5. Measure the ROI of sales, marketing, and customer support

Most CRM tools come with powerful reporting and analytics capabilities, which help you track each customer journey from A to Z, and see how the lead was sourced (marketing), what made them convert (sales), and how they interacted with customer support before and after converting (customer support).

This way, you can analyze the ROI of each team’s efforts and identify and further develop successful initiatives and approaches.

Additionally, you can make informed decisions about sales quotas and tailor your outreach tactics to your audience’s preferences — and gear it toward what works best for them.

How can different business units use CRM software to their advantage?

Each department or business unit will likely use CRM software differently, and with a different goal in mind.

This flexibility is one of the core benefits of CRM platforms.

Management can have a global overview of customer data & relationships

To identify the best strategic opportunities for growth, you need to be able to look at your customer data in its entirety and have access to actionable insights.

Most businesses understand this: 93% of companies plan to continue to increase investments in data analytics.

CRM platforms collect and aggregate data from different sources, giving you a complete overview of your customer base and your sales pipeline.

This makes them an excellent tool to gain an in-depth understanding of customer behavior, the success of current sales processes, identify weak points and opportunities for improvement in customer interactions, and so on.

The sales team can manage communication with leads more efficiently — and close deals faster

CRM platforms are an invaluable tool for sales development representatives (SDRs), as they enable them to:

• Maintain many relationships at once
• Streamline the decision-making process
• Automate follow-ups and regular check-ins
• Personalize their messages
• Adapt their approach to each customer’s preferences and needs
• See which strategies work best — and which ones don’t
• Close deals faster

For the last point, using a comprehensive contract management tool is crucial, as it enables the sales team to prepare and send contracts at a fraction of the time they’d otherwise need — and also makes it super easy for leads to sign.

PandaDoc integrates seamlessly with some of the best and most popular CRM tools like Salesforce, Monday.com, Zendesk Sell, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and more.

Legal can have an open window into all contracts

CRM and legal are not often discussed together, but that’s a mistake: your CRM platform can be a valuable asset for your legal department as well, and serve as a point of reference for all contract information with your customers, allowing the legal team to access it easily whenever necessary.

Your legal department may simply pull all contracts your company has with clients and review them whenever they need to double-check something, review the contract of a long-term client, or compare contracts.

Additionally, using a CRM with PandaDoc makes it easy to prepare, create, and send new contracts — which sometimes requires your sales team and your legal department to work together.

Customer support can tailor its efforts to the needs of individual customers

CRM apps empower your customer support team, too, by giving it access to all the information they need to better understand and serve customers.

With the help of a CRM platform, customer support can easily check past interactions of the client, their purchase history, and also any notes other team members might have added to their profile.

All of this helps provide a personalized service that is tailored to the needs of each customer, taking into account their specific preferences.

This can also help you address any issues before they turn into problems, and make sure each customer knows how to make the most of each service or product they’ve purchased.

Customer success teams can plan and execute new initiatives

In addition to all of the above, a CRM system enables customer success teams to create and develop new campaigns and better measure outcomes.

Customer success teams work at the intersection of sales and customer support, helping customers make the most of each purchase and also moving them to the next step in your sales pipeline, either by upselling or cross-selling other products or services.

For this, they need a CRM to obtain detailed, up-to-date customer information, including past interactions, purchases, and preferences — this allows teams to scale their efforts, use new approaches, and design new customer success initiatives.

What is the best CRM tool to streamline customer relationships?

There are plenty of CRM tools on the market, tailored to different businesses’ priorities, processes, and needs.

When exploring different options, there are several factors to consider. We advise you to look into the following when evaluating each platform:

• Usability: Is the platform easy to use or does it have a steep learning curve?
• Level of automation: Can the platform help you automate and simplify your processes?
• Customization features: Can the CRM system adapt to the needs and functioning of your business?
• Integration capabilities: Can your CRM connect to the rest of your technology stack effortlessly?
• Reporting and analytics: Does it have powerful reporting and data analysis capabilities?

Best in class: Salesforce sales cloud

Considering those factors, Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of the best CRM systems on the market.

It’s trusted by more than 150,000 organizations worldwide and was named a leader in Gartner’s CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC) Magic Quadrant for over a dozen years.

Thanks to its customization capabilities and third-party app integrations (available on its AppExchange), Salesforce Sales Cloud is extremely flexible and versatile, allowing organizations to create a truly tailor-made solution for their needs.

And when you integrate Salesforce with PandaDoc, this is where the magic happens. For teams that use both tools together:

• The number of completed documents increases by 87%
• The time teams need to create documents decreases by 50%
• Deals’ close rate increases by 36%

This helps sales teams reach their optimal productivity level and shorten the sales cycle significantly, as they become more efficient in creating and managing documents — and, most importantly, in getting them sent and signed.

Teams are able to populate contract templates automatically by pulling data from Salesforce, which helps eliminate human error and check the status of each document in real time, creating a single information hub for everything sales-related.

Alternatives: Zoho, HubSpot, Monday.com, and more

There are a number of other popular alternatives to Salesforce, depending on your team’s needs, like Monday, Zoho, HubSpot, and more.

Zoho

Zoho is among the more affordable CRM systems, which can be perfect for small businesses that are looking to scale.

With integration for Zoho CRM, you can create beautiful, personalized proposals, send them to prospects quickly, and track their status from the platform.

HubSpot

HubSpot helps you bring your sales, customer support, and marketing teams closer and streamline their collaboration. Integration for HubSpot enables you to autofill, customize and send documents from the platform, and makes it easier to close deals.

Monday.com

Monday.com is primarily a process management tool with key CRM features integrated into it.

It has a vast library of workflow templates that different teams can use, including CRM and sales processes.

If you integrate PandaDoc with Monday, you’ll be able to streamline repetitive tasks and manage, send, and track customized documents directly from your CRM.

PandaDoc integrates with many other CRM tools, too, such as Zendesk Sell, Copper, Insightly, and more.

PandaDoc with your CRM system — a winning combination

PandaDoc has everything your sales team needs to score more wins, including a rich set of CRM integrations that allow you to manage your entire sales cycle with a signal tool.

Integrating your CRM helps sales teams to quickly create fully personalized documents using a vast template library, share and track changes in documents in real time without leaving your CRM and provide a better experience for leads through automation.

Ready to give it a try? Start a free trial and see how much more powerful your CRM can become.

Disclaimer

PandaDoc is not a law firm, or a substitute for an attorney or law firm. This page is not intended to and does not provide legal advice. Should you have legal questions on the validity of e-signatures or digital signatures and the enforceability thereof, please consult with an attorney or law firm. Use of PandaDocs services are governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Originally published Mar 19, 2019, updated Jul 17, 2024