What Is a CRM?

Three kinds of record, and the links between them are the point. Contacts are the people, companies group those contacts, and deals are the open opportunities attached to them. Around all three sits the interaction history: emails, calls, meetings, notes, and every stage change.

A tool that holds only contacts is an address book. What makes something a CRM is that a deal and its history hang off the contact, so the state of a relationship is visible from the record instead of being reconstructed from a sent-items folder.

A spreadsheet holds the same columns and loses the same argument every time: who changed a row, when, and which copy is current. A CRM assigns an owner to each record, timestamps every change, and keeps one version, so two people reading it at the same moment see the same thing.

The second difference is that a CRM is written to by the tools around it. Sent email, booked meetings and form submissions land on the record without anyone retyping them, which is the part manual upkeep never survives past a busy week.

Segmentation and a path into sending. A database that cannot be filtered into the group you want to contact this week, and then handed to a campaign without an export and a re-import, is storage rather than a working tool.

Reply handling matters just as much. When a prospect answers, the reply, the contact record and the deal have to be the same object, otherwise the follow-up happens inside one mailbox that nobody else can see.