Read time: 2 mins
What is CRM? | FAQs
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is vital to your sales strategy, and as such should form a vital part of any sales manager training.
If you want to find out more about how you can use CRM to improve your sales techniques through effective sales manager training, watch this video where Gareth Cotten, the Head Tutor on the University of Cape Town Sales Management online short course, discusses the CRM basics.
The purpose of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is to keep in constant communication with your customers so that you are able to:
- track what they are spending
- know some of their personal information (such as their birthday, the company they work for and their job role)
- understand their purchase history
It helps you to not only keep on top of that your customers are buying from you but also helps you to forecast what their future purchase decisions will be.
Want to master CRM and ensure it helps your business management and sales skills?
Study the UCT Sales Management online short course and get the best sales manager training today.
Transcription
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management or Customer Relations Management depending on the version of it. Basically the idea there is, tracking and being in constant communication with your customers. So it’s things like tracking what your customers are spending, knowing details about them – when are their birthdays, what companies do they work for, what position do they hold there. Looking at their purchasing history – what products are they buying, what are they spending, when are they buying it. Customer Relationship Management, this helps you to stay on top of one, what you are selling and what your customers are buying, but two, it also helps with forecasts and with proactive selling as well. So if you go back into your Customer Relationship Management system and you can see that certain customers that buy product X also tend to buy product Y two months later, you can then go and look who has bought product X recently and then you can proactively contact customers who have, knowing that there is a very good likelihood that they are going to want to buy product Y as well. So Customer Relationship Management is basically a technological tool that helps you to take broader ideas about sales trends and actually break it down into data which you can then use to make more sales.