CRM is the oldest acronym in the marketing stack and the most overloaded. In B2B companies it names the system of record — Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics — that holds accounts, contacts and deals. In consumer companies it more often names something else: the email, SMS, push and loyalty program that keeps customers buying, and the team that runs it. Of the software categories we compared, CRM is the only one whose name buyers also carry as a job title, and about nine in ten of the interviewees who hold that title run the retention program rather than a sales system.
What is a CRM?
A CRM (customer relationship management) system is the record of a company's customers and its dealings with them — contacts, accounts, purchases, deals and service history — plus the workflow of the people who work them. One software company calls Salesforce “our sales CRM, and basically it's a source of truth for our data.”
In consumer marketing the word has a second meaning: the discipline of keeping customers through owned channels, the team that runs it, and the platform that sends it. A furniture retailer's marketer describes the job as “I manage and oversee our CRM program, so all things email, direct mail, and SMS.”
The second half of the question is the one buyers can answer that a definition cannot:
Which meaning a company uses depends on the business. In these interviews about three in four consumer companies that talk about their CRM use the marketing meaning — the retention program, the team running it, the messaging platform or the customer file, often several at once — against about one in five B2B companies, where CRM means the sales system; regulated industries such as finance and health sit closer to B2B. Companies mostly speak one dialect: few use both meanings.
And the marketing meaning has become a job: interviewees with CRM in their title far outnumber those titled after any other software category, and almost all of them run email, SMS, push or loyalty.
What is the difference between a sales CRM and a marketing CRM?
In these interviews a sales CRM is the system of record for accounts, contacts and deals; a marketing CRM is the program, team and platform that keep customers buying through owned channels. The terms describe how buyers organize their work, not exclusive software categories: some platforms span both. Buyers draw the line themselves — one building-materials manufacturer talks about “linking that gap between what a traditional CRM and a marketing CRM can do.”
The two meanings collide in the same conversation. Asked whether its CRM was Salesforce, a large retailer's marketer answered in the other dialect: “I guess CRM is a separate channel because it's a beast all by itself.”
Some buyers choose the broader word on purpose. A consumer software company's CMO, asked whether its tool is an email service provider, says “I prefer to call it CRM because I think of it as a bigger bucket, but yes, an ESP.”
The vocabulary shows how far the marketing meaning has travelled. In consumer companies, CRM team, CRM program and CRM channels are everyday phrases; buyers use CRM as the name of a team or program several times as often as they do with BI, and far more than with CDP, ESP, CMS or ERP. The difference between a CRM and a CDP is a separate question, covered on CDP vs CRM.
System of record, CRM program, CRM team, customer file
The system of record is the sales and service CRM. A CRM program is email, SMS, push, direct mail and loyalty run as one retention effort. A CRM team in a consumer company is usually that program's owners, not Salesforce admins. The CRM file or database is the list of known customers, uploaded to ad platforms or enriched.
Who owns the CRM?
It depends which CRM. The sales system of record sits with sales, sales operations or IT, often a central Salesforce team. Marketing's CRM sits with a CRM, lifecycle or retention team under marketing or ecommerce — and that is the CRM most of the people in these interviews mean.
In consumer companies the two can sit side by side without touching. A jewellery retailer's marketing leader describes “the CRM team, which is more retention.” Where a consumer company does run a sales CRM, it often serves the wholesale or business side — “Salesforce is used for CRM on our B2B side,” as one large ecommerce retailer puts it — or customer service: a hotel group runs email on Salesforce Marketing Cloud and, “for CRM, Salesforce Service Cloud.”
The stacks follow the dialect. A sales CRM appears in about one in four consumer companies' stacks against about three in five B2B ones, while an email platform appears in about two in three consumer stacks.
What do buyers mean when they say CRM?
Among the companies whose interviewees say “CRM” in these interviews, five meanings appear, in this order of frequency. Each share is taken across all of those companies, B2B and consumer together, and is a minimum: the share in which that meaning can be identified from what buyers said. The meanings overlap, since one company can use several, so the three in four consumer companies above, which counts a company once if it uses any marketing meaning, is a different measure from any single share below:
- The system of record
- The retention program and its channels
- The team that runs it
- The email or messaging platform itself
- The customer file
Four of the five are the marketing meaning. The system of record is the single most common, and it dominates in B2B and regulated companies.
The system of record
Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics or an industry CRM holding accounts, contacts, deals and service history. Dominant in B2B and regulated companies; in consumer companies it often belongs to the wholesale arm or customer service.
A consumer internet company describes Salesforce as “our CRM where basically all our enterprise and mid-market accounts are.” A medical-equipment maker uses it for “basically your traditional kind of CRM, like what the customers purchased, who last went in.”
The retention program and its channels
Email, SMS, push, direct mail and loyalty run as one effort to keep customers buying — about one in three consumer companies use the word this way.
A pharmaceutical company's consumer marketers have “a CRM program that comprises email, SMS, and direct mail,” and a direct-to-consumer brand describes “our owned audience on CRM, so email and SMS.”
The team that runs it
A CRM team, a head of CRM, a CRM manager — in consumer companies, almost always the owners of the retention program.
A consumer technology brand's global CRM lead explains that “part of my remit is to help stand up CRM activities in those regions.” A fintech app's head of CRM says “LCM is the way we've looked at it here, which is why I call it mostly CRM.”
The email or messaging platform itself
The platform named as the CRM, most often Klaviyo or Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Among consumer brands that name a product as their CRM, an email or engagement platform comes up about as often as a sales CRM.
An outdoor-gear brand says “I would say Klaviyo is still our CRM mostly just because we don't have anything else really that's tied with that.”
The customer file
The CRM database or list: known customers, uploaded to ad platforms or used for personalization.
A restaurant chain puts it plainly: “In the case of a CRM, a database of our customers is pretty standard, but how it can be applied to personalization, frequency, lapsed users, all of those parts that bolt to it, those are done by other systems.”
The order is the point. The textbook meaning is still the single most common one, but taken together the marketing meanings are used about as widely — and in consumer companies they are the main one. Anyone comparing CRM vendors, reading a CRM job posting or answering a CRM survey is working with two definitions at once.
Which CRM systems do buyers use?
Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics dominate the system-of-record meaning, with Oracle, SAP and Zoho behind them and industry CRMs in specific sectors. What marketing calls its CRM is usually an email or messaging platform. Ratings for the sales CRMs are on what CRM buyers wish they'd known.
HubSpot sits in both columns: B2B buyers use it as their sales CRM and their marketing platform at once. Industry CRMs matter more than their share suggests — Veeva in pharmaceutical field sales, Blackbaud in nonprofits, Epic in health systems, dealer CRMs in auto retail — and some companies run an ERP such as NetSuite as their CRM.
The system of record
Salesforce · HubSpot · Microsoft Dynamics · Oracle · SAP · Zoho — and industry CRMs: Veeva · Blackbaud · Epic · dealer CRMs · OpenTable
What marketing calls its CRM
Klaviyo · Salesforce Marketing Cloud · Iterable · Attentive · Postscript · Marketo · Adobe Journey Optimizer · Mailchimp
The structural finding sits underneath the list. The same word covers two purchases that rarely compete: a consumer brand choosing its “CRM” is usually choosing an email platform, and a B2B company is choosing a sales system. Treating them as one category is how a comparison ends up weighing products that do different jobs.
What does the split cost?
The customer ends up in two places, and the two disagree. The cost is not the second system but keeping the record consistent across both: where both meanings exist in one company, buyers describe a sales or service CRM and a marketing platform holding different halves of the record, in different structures. A hospital system runs “one CRM that supports more of the outside sales group, their analytics and their profile management, and emails are in one data structure, and then the customer is in a different data structure.”
Running the email platform as the CRM can hit a ceiling. One direct-to-consumer accessories brand says “Klaviyo really is like our CRM tool, so I think if we were to move off of them, we would look at having to supplement that with a true, natural CRM,” and another brand's CEO found the program outgrew the tool — “our CRM program is more advanced than what Klaviyo is naturally suited for” — and the cost became a hire. The license, admin and customization costs of a sales CRM are on what CRM buyers actually pay, and the complaints on top complaints about CRM platforms.
The label can also outrun the use. A life-sciences company's marketer says of its marketing cloud: “Although we call it a CRM, it's really being used just as an ESP, an email sending tool.”
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It depends which CRM you mean. A company that sells through accounts and deals needs a system of record; a consumer brand that sells directly often runs its customer relationships through an email platform, and in these interviews many do without a sales CRM — where they have one, it often serves a wholesale arm or customer service.
Four things follow, and they are our recommendations rather than practices buyers describe. First, decide which meaning a vendor, job posting or RFP uses before comparing anything. Second, a consumer brand without a business-to-business arm may not need a sales CRM at all. Third, if your email or engagement platform is your CRM, check which jobs it covers — accounts, the sales pipeline, service history and the customer data your business will need — before you outgrow it; the answer depends on the platform. Fourth, if you run both, decide which system is authoritative for each kind of customer data, how the records sync and which team owns the definitions; the cost buyers describe is the split record, not the second system. For why companies change the sales system, see why companies switch CRM platforms, and for why most never do, the CRM nobody leaves.
Common questions
What is a CRM?
A CRM (customer relationship management) system is the record of a company's customers and its dealings with them — contacts, accounts, purchases, deals and service history — plus the workflow of the people who work them. Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics are the most-named in these interviews. In consumer marketing the word also has a second meaning: the email, SMS and loyalty program that keeps customers buying.
What does CRM mean in marketing?
In consumer marketing, CRM usually means the program that keeps customers buying through owned channels — email, SMS, push and loyalty — and the team that runs it. In these interviews about three in four consumer companies that talk about their CRM use it this way, against about one in five B2B companies, where CRM means the sales system.
Is an email platform a CRM?
Not in the system-of-record sense, but many consumer brands call it one: in these interviews they name an email or messaging platform such as Klaviyo or Salesforce Marketing Cloud as their CRM about as often as they name a sales CRM. Some who do this describe a ceiling and expect to add a dedicated CRM later; whether a given platform covers accounts, deals and service history depends on the platform.
What does a CRM manager do?
In these interviews, almost always email, SMS, push and loyalty: about nine in ten interviewees with CRM in their job title run the retention program rather than a sales system. CRM is the only software category among those we compared whose name buyers also carry as a job title.
What is the difference between a CRM and a CDP?
A CRM is the system of record for known customer relationships and the work done with them; a CDP assembles customer data from many systems and sends audiences to the tools that use them. Buyers in these interviews rarely choose between the two and often run both.
Do B2C companies need a CRM?
Many consumer companies in these interviews run their customer relationships through an email platform rather than a sales CRM: a sales CRM appears in about one in four consumer companies' stacks against about three in five B2B ones, and where a consumer company has one it often serves its wholesale or B2B arm or its customer service team.
What are the most common CRM systems?
Salesforce, HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics dominate these interviews, with Oracle, SAP and Zoho behind them. Industry CRMs fill specific niches: Veeva in pharmaceutical field sales, Blackbaud in nonprofits, Epic in health systems, and dealer CRMs in auto retail.
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