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CRM Software:

A Quick Breakdown

What CRM software does for companies, and how you can be a part of the future of business.

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By Connor Laux

February 18, 2021

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When young people enter the professional world, they are inevitably introduced to Salesforce. Many are often intrigued because Salesforce is a tool few are exposed to it in college but is critical to everyday operations for businesses. Salesforce is used by every type of company, from Fortune 500 corporations down to ma-and-pa businesses in your hometown. 

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When people ask what Salesforce does, many encounter complex terms like metadata or out-of-date references such as using a rolodex. Explaining what Salesforce does for companies cannot be summarized in one sentence, but we can give a simple answer: Salesforce is the world’s most used CRM. 

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CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is software that manages customer data generated by businesses. When a company finds a new client, they have to store data about that client, ranging from their contact information to the products they need. Salesforce is a type of CRM software used to help businesses keep track of data and give business owners solutions for how to grow their business. 

 


CRM’s and Data Management 

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The bread and butter of CRM software is metadata or data about data. Metadata can help companies understand trends and expose new markets for business to grow if they can understand how to apply metadata to their business model. 

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For example, let’s say a company wants to apply CRM for real estate. The company has access to lots of data, like contact information of potential buyers, how long they have been in the market, and neighborhoods where homes quickly sell. To make the most of this data, a real estate agent would have to spend many hours factoring information together to pair the right homes with the right buyers. 

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This is where a CRM software can be used to combine the datasets into metadata which tells real estate agents which homes they should show to customers. Data and metadata add up quickly and it can be impossible for a single real estate agent to factor all their data into a single number. CRM for real estate companies gives agents the software to store data and organize it in comprehensive ways to optimize their business. 

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What Makes a Good CRM? 


Now that we know what a CRM does, it’s beneficial to understand what makes a specific CRM software better than other CRM softwares. Every CRM faces two critical problems: 


1) They need to compute and share data effectively
2) they must be adaptable to the wide variety of business models. 

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CRMs address these flaws by making it easy to bring data into their platform, and by being flexible enough to accommodate all types of businesses. CRM’s who excel at optimizing for a wide variety of businesses (like CRM for real estate) will inherently succeed more than CRM’s which struggle to fit every company’s need. 

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1) Simplifying the Data Sharing Process 


To understand the magnitude of this problem, let's return to the example of a CRM for real estate. If your job was to input data into a CRM, you would spend all day copying forms into the CRM, contacting agents to confirm their numbers, and performing other versions of tedious work for hours on end. 


One way CRMs solved this problem by linking with third-party platforms. A common integration with Salesforce is a software called Formstack, which allows you to create custom forms for customers to fill out and sign with eSignatures. Logging into Salesforce from Formstack links both softwares, and once both are connected Formstack responses will automatically be stored in Salesforce. 

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This is great because businesses generate data from a lot of sources, and most of those sources can be integrated. A company using Salesforce’s CRM for real estate may have to deal with analytics from Facebook ads, accounting data from Quickbooks, website performance figures from WordPress, and marketing information from Mailchimp. 

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With Salesforce, all of these platforms can be linked to Salesforce. There are even real estate-specific tools developed for Salesforce such as PropertyRadar that compile lists of for sale addresses. Third-party integrations are a difference-maker for companies choosing which CRM to use, whether the company needs CRM for real estate or CRM for banking. 

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2) How CRM’s Adapt for Different Business Models 


What similarities does a real estate firm selling homes in suburban Oklahoma City have with a company renting apartments in the Bay Area? Not much. They are working with a totally different type of customer, ownership model, and market conditions. Both companies need to compute similar types of data in different ways. We know how CRM for real estate works, but can it fulfill the needs of different companies in the same field? 

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This is an essential question for CRM designers. If they make their product too specific, it won’t be useful to the vast majority of businesses. If they make their software too general, then it will lack the functionality necessary to operate. The most common way that CRMs solve this issue is to allow user customization. This allows businesses to use their CRM in the most effective way for their business model. 


Salesforce demonstrates the possibilities for a good CRM software. It comes with a selection of four objects that are applicable to nearly every business: Accounts, Contacts, Leads, and Opportunities. Every business will need to use these objects to varying degrees, they are very detailed and contain the tools to build an interconnected web of data. 

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The great aspect of Salesforce’s objects is the freedom companies have to customize how objects work with each other to produce valuable metadata. 

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Let’s return to our example of CRM for real estate. There are thousands of ways for a real estate firm to design a Salesforce CRM to optimize their business. Here are three ways a real estate firm can optimize their company using Salesforce: 


1) They can have a custom object for assessing the value of a property 
2) Using a new object to create a summary of property values for customers generated by the first object 
3) Direct the property summaries to specific people in the company so everyone from accountants to agents has the right information. 

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This is just the tip of the iceberg! Salesforce is incredibly adaptable to specific business needs, and every company needs the services of a Salesforce consultant to optimize their CRM for real estate or whatever business they run. 

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Why You Should Learn CRM 


The popularity of CRM’s essentially guarantees that you will encounter one wherever you work. But they are also creating excitement because the market for CRM-related jobs is exploding along with its ubiquity. Whether CRM for real estate or banking, every Salesforce customization we mentioned needs a user to help companies implement CRM software. The Salesforce Lightning platform has made Salesforce accessible to the next generation of admins. Get involved today!

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