CRM
What a CRM is, what it stores, and where it ends.
What does the CRM category cover?
What a CRM actually is, how field service CRM differs, and how CRM compares to ERP, FSM, project management and spreadsheets.
What CRM covers
A CRM stores who you are talking to and what has been said. That is genuinely useful, and it is also where most CRM categories stop. The record of the relationship is separated from the record of the work, so the sale is tracked in one system and the job, the crew, the materials and the invoice live somewhere else.
This category explains what a CRM is, the data it is designed to hold, the difference between a sales CRM and an operational one, and the specific point where a contact database stops being enough for a business that has to deliver work after the sale.
It also covers the unglamorous parts that decide whether a CRM survives contact with reality: deduplication, ownership, record linking, and what happens to history when a lead becomes a customer.
What you'll learn
- What a CRM stores and what it deliberately does not
- Where a sales-only CRM breaks for a business that delivers work
- Why duplicate records are the most expensive small problem in CRM
- How customer history should survive the move from lead to job
Pages in CRM
Frequently asked questions
What does CRM actually stand for in practice?
Customer relationship management — a system of record for people, conversations and deals. In practice, its value is not the acronym but whether every person in the business sees the same version of the customer.
Is a spreadsheet enough instead of a CRM?
A spreadsheet works while one person owns every conversation. It fails the moment two people edit it, someone works offline, or you need history on who said what and when.
What is an operational CRM?
One where the customer record connects directly to the work — estimates, scheduling, crews, materials and invoices — so nothing has to be retyped when a lead turns into a job.