Customer Relationship Management systems or CRM systems for short have been utilized in marketing and sales for a while. They often come with plenty of bells and whistles, some of which are more than many businesses require or know how to handle.

However, there is no denying that CRM systems are here to stay and that using them can have a tremendous positive impact on the success of your marketing and sales departments. Let’s have a closer look at CRM and why correct contact data is vital to sales and marketing, among other benefits:

CRM and Its Benefits

CRM systems offer you a centralized hub in which to track all of your lead nurturing and sales activities. They will usually contain a wealth of information about your prospects and customers, such as their complete contact profile. In CRM systems you’ll also find databases that contain information that will help you analyze the success of your sales activities. CRM can do many things, but these are its main benefits:

• Enabling the alignment of sales and marketing — CRM does a great job at ensuring that sales and marketing don’t work in separate silos, and instead collaborate to hit their monthly numbers;

• More natural lead generation and access to lead intelligence — another way in which CRM enables sales and marketing to work better together is ensuring that the sales department has easy access to all the relevant lead intelligence;

• More visibility and easier assessment of success — CRMs make it easier for the marketing department to evaluate the success of their campaigns, while the sales department has better visibility into their pipeline which fosters better prioritization.

Storing Customer Data

Customer data is vital to a successful marketing and sales process. CRM systems, fortunately, help you gather and save it. Without having to limit your business data to spreadsheets or an individual sales rep’s memory, your business will gain more space to scale and expand.

Storing customer data within a CRM is what most businesses do because of its easy accessibility to sales and marketing and real-time updates. It ensures that your salespeople and marketers will be ready to jump on a chance to close a deal or draw a new customer in as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Contact Data Software Solutions

However, to have any use out of customer data, businesses must ensure that what they have in their CRM is accurate and updated. You can accomplish this by opting for a software solution like Runner EDQ’s CLEAN_Customer, which integrates with CRM systems. It provides verification and validation of customer contact data, and it also updates any wrong information to make it accurate. If you ensure you have enterprise quality data to go with your CRM, your sales and marketing efforts will certainly start yielding better results.