What to choose? Contact Management Solutions or Customers Relationship Managemen

Posted by Cool Life CRM on February 10th, 2018

As part of your 2018 Marketing and PR strategy, you want to get a better hold on your day-to-day management methodologies and processes. You already have the idea of contact management (CM) system. But you heard of customer relationship management (CRM) software, recently. And you are now confused between the two.

Well! You are not the only one who is confused between the two. Many Software vendors face challenges in figuring out what each solution entails. It’s not easy for them too to decide which platform is best suited for their client’s business. We are here laying down some basic principles that can help determine which solution will suit in which business scenario.

Contact Management solutions are specifically designed to increase the productivity of any organization, as it helps Contact Managers to efficiently manage contacts, accounts database, and opportunities. It is often used in combination with email integration and calendar apps. A contact management system helps its users in getting quick and flawless access to their account names and contact details. Quite often, some contact managers perceive CM to be a small module within CRM.

In contrast, Customer relationship management is a multi-module solution, which records and organizes all the contact navigations and interactions. CRM not only offers PR pro that helps in getting the crucial names and email addresses, but also provides good opportunities in outreach strategy, contact behavior, and sales cycle, etc.

What benefits each solution provides

A contact management system is adept in storing data, thus helping team to maintain contacts along with prospects, client information, and other media relations. Most of the CM solutions help in:

• Easily storing contact details including phone numbers, addresses,  and emails
• Organizing contacts into groups while also sorted by different categories
• Flawlessly tracking critical communication with clients and prospects
• Automating reminders for frequent follow-ups and future interactions and communication

Here is one of the major differentiating factors. A CRM system or solution helps not only in maintaining crucial information about contacts and accounts, but also in recording and maintaining relationships with the prospects, customers, and media connections by flawlessly easing the processes in tandem with the sales funnel. Clearly, CRM implies more than basic storage of contacts. In fact, the leading CRM systems:

• Easily capture and track all communications and interactions with prospects, contacts and customers
• Notify and alert users when it’s time to go for follow-ups with the contacts
• Store contact details like physical addresses, phone numbers, and e-mails
• Maintain up-to-date notes and documents linked with the contacts
• Provide detailed insights and analytics for strategic marketing & PR planning
• Help in properly developing, implementing and tracking branding and marketing campaigns
• Help increase the client retention rates

A CRM system is considered as a more robust system than CM owing to the fact that rather than simply recording and maintain contact details, CRM provides a complete 360-degree view of each contact along with the sales pitches, and client relationship. And this makes it tick for a many Customer Relationship Managers.