Being original used to be the most common advice in business, but that has become almost impossible today. However, one thing has never gone out of style: delivering consistent, high-quality products and services.
In a saturated market, customers develop increasingly specific preferences, making it essential to deliver an experience that they believe resonates with their needs. This is where the CRM strategy comes in.
In this article, we learn about the CRM system, the importance of having a strategy around it, and outline steps and tips for building a CRM strategy that works.
What is a CRM?
A customer relationship management (CRM) system mainly refers to the centralized software businesses use to manage customer interactions. Its primary feature revolves around a database of customer information, including contact details, purchase history, and related communications. Other value-added features would include ways to manage touchpoints, create and monitor sales/marketing campaigns, as well as provide direct customer support.
The centralized system allows different teams to better collaborate on interactions with current and potential customers-marketing, sales, customer service, and IT teams are typically the ones involved in the use of a CRM.
What is a CRM Strategy?
Software is nothing if it’s not used well, and that’s where the CRM strategy comes into play.
A CRM strategy is a comprehensive plan for managing interactions with customers, which includes processes, techniques, and the overall culture that a business observes when it comes to dealing with its audience. The goal of a CRM strategy is to enhance the customer experience, which then translates into more sales, higher revenue, and greater profit.
An effective CRM strategy accounts for all stages of the customer journey, which we can condense into the following:
- Reach, which involves identifying and connecting with potential customers,
- Acquisition, which deals with converting potential customers into actual sales, and
- Retention, which includes methods for delivering consistent value and building customer loyalty, results in long-term business.
It can be easy to mistake the CRM strategy with the sales funnel, but there are key differences between the two- a CRM strategy refers to the specific action plans around managing customer relationships, while the sales funnel is much like the list above: areas in which your CRM strategy can be applied.
Why Do I Need a CRM Strategy?
At a basic level, an effective CRM system and strategy can help you maintain long-term relationships with your customers, which can be 5 to 25 times more cost-effective than constantly acquiring new clients.
Maintaining these relationships involves achieving various advantages through a solid CRM strategy:
1. Improved collaboration between internal teams
Multiple teams are responsible for making sure the customer experience is as smooth as possible, and every team-from sales, marketing to IT- might work a little differently. This can make collaboration difficult, but a CRM strategy consolidates the most useful information for all teams, so they can pull what they need and operate as they see fit. This streamlines communication, minimizes overlap, and optimizes time spent on nurturing customer relationships.
2. Enable a satisfying customer experience
When all your teams can do their best work, you can ensure that customers are well taken care of every step of the way. From initial contact to sales conversions, a CRM strategy helps your team speak the customer’s language, which improves how their needs are addressed.
3. Highlight high-value opportunities
A CRM strategy improves data organization, which cascades into better insight into your customer base. Where are they in the customer journey? What strategies are currently in place to move them along that journey? Most importantly, how might they be responding to our marketing/sales efforts?
By utilizing a CRM strategy framework, you’re able to take a data-driven approach to customer service, and you can make more informed decisions about how to create more targeted sales and marketing campaigns for both potential and existing customers.
An effective CRM strategy offers a solid foundation for customer service not just by enhancing the client experience, but reinforcing the way that your teams facilitate these experiences. In this way, you’re not just maintaining a good long-term relationship with your outward market, but also your most important customer, which is the teams that help keep your business running.
How to Build an Effective CRM Strategy
We know the CRM now, and we know the impact it can have on our business. But where do you start building a CRM implementation strategy?
Below we’ve compiled a step-by-step guide to building a CRM strategy, with useful tips you can apply to match your needs.
1. Know your goals & customers
In the effort to build highly targeted sales and marketing efforts across your entire customer pool, you want to be clear about what it is you want to achieve with each.
Are you looking to drive more traffic from your marketing channels to your shopping platforms? Increase customer support survey ratings? Improve sales?
Different goals will require different approaches, so clarifying is essential, especially for new customers. It’s also important to identify appropriate metrics from these goals, such as website impressions, click-through rates, response times, or conversion rates.
Each customer, whether new or old, requires a buyer persona. Build profiles based on customer demographics, pain points,s and any buying behaviors they may have. This helps to further inform your goals, as well as appropriate tactics to apply down the line.
2. Outline the customer journey
Most buyer personas follow a similar journey, which can be broken down into:
- Awareness: The customer first learns about your brand, product, or service.
- Consideration: The customer takes an active interest in your offerings.
- Purchase: Finalize the sale; customers sign up for your service, or purchase one or more of your products.
- Retention: Customers turn into regulars, regularly engaging with your business through repeat purchases or support interactions.
- Loyalty: On top of continued business, customers willingly recommend your product to others.
In each of these stages, it’s important to map out how the customer interacts with your brand, through which touchpoints, and how the business enhances this experience. Use the following questions as a guide:
- Customer Actions: What specific interactions are available to the customer at this stage?
- Touchpoints: Which of our platforms are involved in this stage? Social media? Digital/physical storefront? Communications channels? Online Search?
- Business Actions: Which approaches do we take to encourage customer interaction further?
Think of this step as if you’re building a playbook for each customer, outlining specific steps and how your entire team aims to raise the score (i.e., create more conversions) with each customer. In its ideal state, you will want to have built plans catered to each customer. This becomes easier over time, as you collect more data and adapt your strategy to match their unique needs.
3. Find a suitable CRM
Your choice of CRM software is critical, and can either reinforce your strategy or keep it from reaching its full potential. In searching for the right tool, consider the following key features:
- Contact Management: The foundation of any CRM; it lets you store and organize customer information (names, contact details, etc.) in one place.
- Sales Pipeline Management: It’s essentially your backlog. It helps you keep track of ongoing leads, negotiations, and other customer activity, which aids in follow-ups and in translating marketing efforts into sales.
- Reporting and Analytics: Think of this as your advisor. It helps you measure performance and gain insight into how customers interact with your strategy. This will lead to more informed changes to your CRM strategy framework.
4. Get stakeholder buy-in
Communication is key in any management exercise, and implementing a CRM strategy is no exception.
Compile the strategy you’ve built above and share it with stakeholders-this includes any higher management and, most importantly, teams that directly use your CRM, such as sales, marketing, and IT. Make sure processes are outlined and metrics are defined so your team can work with more agency.
5. Monitor & adapt
As we mentioned above, reporting is an essential part of your CRM. Refer back to the goals and metrics you set at the beginning, and implement appropriate tools to measure performance around that. Are customers churning at a noticeable rate anywhere in the journey? What touchpoints might be causing this?
Make sure to allocate time for regular reviews, as well as time to adapt your strategy accordingly. It’s important to remember that a CRM strategy works best under a customer-focused approach, and this stage is the best example of that.
It can be overwhelming to do this all at once, especially if you have an existing customer base. To help with this, consider a phased implementation; that way, your team can ease into the changes without severely impacting your day-to-day operations.
This is especially important if you’re introducing a new CRM tool entirely. Before anything else, you will want to focus on getting core functionality up and running, then migrating any existing customer data to the new contact management solution. From there, you can slowly introduce more advanced features, such as integrated task tracking and integrations with external tools like email and chat.
Additionally, consider automating specific processes to help you save more time. This makes sense later on in your implementation once you’ve observed patterns in the work. For example, you might automate sending email or mobile notifications to your marketing teams when new leads are added to the CRM. You might also automate flags to your sales team when high-value clients initiate purchases, as you would want to ensure that they receive consistent, high-quality delivery. By automating recurring tasks and communicating updates to relevant parties, you help the team stay on top of a growing list of customer activity.
CRM Strategy Examples
Building the customer journey takes up a large portion of your CRM strategy, so we’ve compiled examples of business actions you can apply at each stage that apply to a wide range of markets.
Awareness
A CRM marketing strategy places heavy emphasis on the awareness stage, and social media is king here. Good examples of actions here include publishing educational content around your product/service. Running targeted ads on various platforms is also helpful and is a way of utilizing the algorithm to your advantage.
Consideration
Standing out is key in this stage, so actions that highlight your unique selling points and credibility are especially important. An e-commerce CRM strategy would pay extra attention here with things like product reviews, testimonials, and influencer marketing.
Purchase
Most, if not all, businesses will require some form of transaction, whether in-store or online, so tactics that entice users to close the deal make sense here. Discount codes and secure payment options are some of the most commonly used features in the purchase stage, and the “fast checkout” feature for existing customers eliminates the extra steps around entering payment and shipping information. The rule of thumb here is: the easier it is to pay, the more likely they will.
Retention
Retention requires customer satisfaction, which in your case means enabling them to get the best experience out of the product/service. Sending them clear instructions for use or including an easy-to-follow manual is the most common example here. Another good example is a loyalty/rewards feature, which allows customers some return on their continued use of your product/service.
Loyalty
The loyalty stage is two-fold: on one hand, you streamline continued business with the existing customer. Subscription models are now becoming more common, not just with software/services, but with physical products as well. This allows your most satisfied customers to automate purchases, enabling a more hands-free experience for both the customer and you.
On the other hand, loyalty might come in the form of word-of-mouth, which is a time-tested marketing tool that helps complete the cycle back to the awareness stage. A feature to share reviews on products on your website or through social media, referral rewards programs are a commonly used technique here.
Ultimately, the unique combination of your customers and your available touchpoints will play a part in determining what kinds of strategies you can apply.
Implement Your CRM Strategy with Workamajig
Your CRM strategy is the blueprint for bridging customers to your business, and if that plan fails, your business goes with it. To protect against this, you also need to be able to confidently execute the strategy, and a robust task management system like Workamajig does exactly that.
With Workamajig, the ultimate project management software, you have an all-in-one solution for plotting tasks, allocating work, and seamlessly transitioning into task and resource management. Manage customer service tasks with ease, then use built-in collaboration and reporting tools to ensure that your team stays on top of the work, completing tasks and addressing roadblocks along the way.
Originally published September 15, 2025.