Updated September 2026
TL;DR
A CRM (customer relationship management) system keeps your customer data, sales leads, and communications in one place so nothing slips through the cracks. It helps small businesses save time and helps larger ones manage complexity, while improving retention, collaboration, and decision-making through better data. If you’re choosing a CRM, look for one that fits your budget, is easy to set up, and can grow with you. We recommend HighLevel (formerly GoHighLevel).
What Is A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System?
A CRM system is a digital tool that you and your team can take advantage of to streamline your workload in all kinds of ways. This integrated, data-driven software solution has the potential to improve how you interact and do business with your customers. Beyond that, CRM systems will help you manage and maintain customer relationships, track sales leads, marketing, and pipeline, and deliver actionable data. But there’s even more to a CRM!
What Makes A CRM Solution Right for You?
With CRM solutions, you can expect an increase in your profitability for several reasons. Well-implemented CRM solutions will result in streamlined administrative processes in your sales, marketing, and service divisions. You’ll also be able to focus on developing and maintaining important customer relationships.
The right CRM solution will provide you with a multifaceted platform where everything you need to develop, improve, and retain your customer relationships is kept safe and secure. An integrated CRM solution will offer you growth opportunities and prevent you from losing revenue by maximizing the potential of your operating processes and developing and strengthening your customer relationships and sales leads.
Proper setup, maintenance, and use of a CRM can stop all kinds of common workplace mistakes before they happen. You’ll be able to prevent the awkward overlap that can occur when two salespeople accidentally pursue the same potential customer, and you won’t have to worry about misplacing customer contact information or other simple mistakes that can cause major setbacks. If you’re looking for a way to streamline your work in a way that’s simple and has real, tangible results, we definitely suggest considering a CRM.
But which CRM solution is right for you? We’ll get there, but first let’s look at what types of businesses can benefit most from having one.
Who Benefits Most from a CRM?
In our experience, everyone from small business owners to prominent leaders in the industry can benefit from the many advantages of a CRM. Some of these reasons overlap, and some are unique to small or large organizations.
Small Businesses
It’s tough to stay competitive in the world of small business. A CRM can help set you apart from the pack by streamlining your processes and taking some of the burdens off of your staff members. Small businesses can quickly get overworked, and using a CRM to streamline and automate some of the tedium of the day-to-day tasks can improve your company morale and free up your staff for more important work.
Large Businesses
If your company or organization already has a long reach and a broad customer base, a CRM can make all those complexities much easier to handle. With so many customers, it’s unfortunately easy to get wires crossed or confused. You’ll never have to worry about letting details slip through the cracks when you’ve got a dependable CRM system in place, and your company will continue to grow and develop seamlessly.
How Can a CRM Improve Your Customer Relationships?
No matter what size your business is, you need positive customer relationships. The better your reputation for customer treatment is, the more likely you are to both retain old customers and attract new ones.
It can be very difficult to keep in close, personalized contact with all of your customers as your business grows—even if you are a small business, your customers’ needs will change over time and staying on top of those changes can be intimidating. Fortunately, this is where a CRM can really help.
Know Your Customers
Because a CRM is an organizational tool, you can use it to keep important information right at your fingertips. Every time you interact with a customer, your CRM can give you important reminders, including the customer’s contact information, their position in the company, their working preferences, and more. Most CRMs allow you to add context to contact records, like notes from meetings and calls, tags that tell you useful information at a glance (like what products they’ve purchased and whether they’re a lead or customer), and linking their social profiles and company website. You’re less likely to be caught ill-prepared in a conversation with a customer when you have a CRM to lean on.
Retain
You know it’s more cost-effective and productive overall to retain customers rather than pick up new ones. A CRM makes this easier than ever! Thanks to the organizational abilities of a CRM, you won’t have to worry about missing important communication opportunities with customers or sending the wrong emails to the wrong people. Your CRM system will also keep track of which customers need which communications based on whatever marketing strategy you might be using at the time.
Does your customer have a birthday or company milestone coming up? If you’ve kept this information in their contact record, you set alerts so you’re reminded and can reach out to celebrate or congratulate them.
Have they submitted more support requests than usual? If you’re tracking activities like this in your CRM, you can flag an Account Manager to reach out to check in and provide extra support.
Has a customer who has only ever purchased product A exhibited interest in product B or a need for product C? If you’re tracking email and website engagement, phone calls, etc., these activities can give you insight into how to best serve them next. Which gets us to our next point…
Anticipate
Every customer appreciates when a provider can accurately predict their needs, and a CRM makes that easier. It can track trends in what your customers are interested in and whether they ask questions or make requests of your organization. You’ll be able to track your customers’ interests and accurately predict what they’ll be interested in next. When you can anticipate your customers’ needs, they’ll be that much more likely to stay loyal to your organization and feel appreciated on an individual level.
Communicate
A good CRM also allows you to store email templates, call scripts, pre-defined packages, and more in a central location. You’ll be able to create customized newsletters, proposals, quotes, and more, and share them with the appropriate staff or entire teams. This feature, combined with your CRM’s ability to schedule and streamline communications, will make it possible for you to improve the quality and the consistency of your communication with your customers.
What Other Benefits Can a CRM Offer?
CRMs can work wonders in customer relations, but they can have plenty of other unexpected benefits, including the following:
Dependable Data Collection
Few things can improve your business more than dependable data collection. When you can track your expenses, your successes (new leads, closed deals, client upgrades), your failures (lost deals, stagnant clients), and more, you’re much better equipped to predict the future of your organization and plan accordingly. CRM software is designed to log and track this data in an accurate, readable way. Tracking your data via reports and dashboards makes it easier to extract insights, notice patterns, set accurate goals, and grow your business in a realistic, sustainable way.
Easier Team Collaboration
Teamwork is more important in the workplace than ever before, especially with so many companies utilizing a mixed in-office and at-home strategy. A good CRM, used properly, will make it possible for your team to easily communicate and share insights regardless of the distance or even time zones between them. Most CRMs have built-in communication methods that are easy to set up, and because CRM technology uses the cloud, all of this will happen in real-time.
Segment (Categorize) Your Customers
The best way to appeal to many customers at once is through well-done segmentation. For example, it can be extremely helpful to sort your customers by interest level; customers who are committed to your organization will benefit from different emails and marketing methods than customers who are brand new or leads who are on the fence about your product or service. Using tags, lists, and segments, you can sort your customer base into as many different groups as you need, and this sorting system will be much more thorough and systematic (and take less time) than sorting customer information manually.
The CRM We Recommend The Most
With so many CRM options out there, choosing one can feel like its own project. We’ve worked in the digital space long enough to have used or managed several (for our own company and for our clients), including:
- Salesforce
- ActiveCampaign
- Constant Contact
- MailChimp
- HubSpot
- Slate
- …and more!
For many small and growing businesses, we recommend HighLevel. It’s the platform we use ourselves.
HighLevel brings the tools most businesses end up juggling separately into one place: contact management, sales pipelines, email and text messaging, appointment scheduling, forms, automated follow-ups, and even social media and landing page management. That means fewer logins, fewer integrations to maintain, and a clearer picture of every customer relationship.
A few reasons it stands out:
- HighLevel is affordable: Pricing is more comparable to Constant Contact and MailChimp (though in some cases cheaper), but we’ve found its user experience and capabilities to outperform similarly priced CRMs. Compared to some of the more well-known bigger players, it has many of the same capabilities, but you aren’t charged an arm and a leg for every little thing (like the number of contacts, even if they aren’t active). So, in our view, you get more for your dollar.
- HighLevel has an approachable setup: You can start with the basics, like contacts, a pipeline, and a few automated emails, and add more as you get comfortable. They also provide setup assistance for a fraction of the fee that other CRMs charge. If you prefer the DIY route, they have plenty of support documentation and tutorials, a community of other users and experts you can lean on, and you can use their handy AI assistant to make it even easier.
- HighLevel is built to grow with you: As your needs expand, the same platform supports more advanced automation, AI-assisted conversations, and multi-channel campaigns, so you won’t need to switch systems later.
No CRM is a perfect fit for everyone, but if you want a practical, all-in-one option that won’t outgrow your budget but will grow with you, HighLevel is worth a look in our book.
The Takeaway
Whether you’re a startup, have been around long enough that spreadsheets and docs just aren’t cutting it anymore, or you’re an established business looking to switch CRMs to help you get to the next level of growth, there is a solution for you, and Greenstone Media can help.
Here’s where to start:
- Schedule a free consultation to discuss your needs (where you are and where you want to be)
- Get a CRM solution that works for you (whether you’re completely new to CRMs or need to switch to a different one)
- Grow your business with less headaches and more satisfied customers
If you need help implementing an effective CRM for your business, and integrating it with your website or ad campaigns, schedule a free consultation with our team.
