Collecting customer data to inform your marketing outreach is more important than ever. Evolving privacy regulations are changing the ways marketers can target leads through media channels, meaning brands need to own their audience data and establish direct lines of communication with them.

That’s where a CRM comes in. Customer relationship management systems collect real-time, first-party and zero-party (provided) data on customers and prospects. You own this data about your customers, so you can stop guessing who they are. Knowing who your current and potential customers are allows you to build trust with them and create personalized relationships through your marketing efforts — which a CRM can help you manage.

That’s just one reason having a CRM solution for your business is crucial. Here are a few more.

1. Generate, Capture and Nurture Leads

Without the right system, keeping track of all the leads your marketing efforts are generating can be difficult — if not impossible. With a CRM system, you can capture these leads and keep tabs on them throughout their customer journey.

Most CRM solutions allow you to capture lead and customer information across all marketing and sales channels in a single contact record. This means you can click on a lead’s name and see every phone call, email, pitch and offer they have received — an invaluable resource for tracking the customer journey. This visualization of the entire journey can also help you turn them into customers; for example, if you see that they frequently engage with marketing emails, it may be time to focus on sales email outreach.

2. Streamline and Automate Customer Communication

Automation capabilities count as another benefit of a CRM system. Whether it’s a simple task that you complete daily or a task that’s just plain tedious, a CRM can take it off your plate and allow you to focus on more strategic priorities. Most CRM solutions can automate the following activities:

• Email communications (follow-up messages, “item left in cart” messages, etc.)

• Sales workflows (unenrollment trigger workflows, deal workflows, etc.)

• Website chatbot functions

• Analytics reporting

All of these tasks are important when it comes to lead engagement and marketing outreach, but they can be time consuming if done manually. CRM systems can give you that time back while providing you with detailed reports and ensuring that your clients are receiving consistent outreach.

3. Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Consolidating information in a CRM system is also a great way to ensure internal alignment between your sales and marketing teams, a crucial connection for successful conversion. Establishing a CRM leads to important conversations between sales and marketing, such as:

• When is a lead ready to be contacted by sales?

• What actions define the life-cycle stages of our customer journey?

• What qualities make a lead more likely to convert to a customer?

The answers to these questions become data points in your CRM. Once they are tracked and analyzed, you can refine your marketing-to-sales handoff to improve conversion rates and shorten your sales cycle.

A CRM solution also allows you to assign and track internal tasks, visualize workflows and give everyone access to customer information you’ve collected and stored. This allows your teams to not only work on the same projects and clients simultaneously but also collaborate on them.

Having strong cross-team support will benefit the leads you’re contacting as well as your company. When information is not siloed by department, both sales and marketing can provide consistent outreach that meets leads and customers where they are in the customer journey.

In other words, the right CRM allows you to accomplish two crucial business goals with one solution.