What is a collaborative CRM?

A fully-integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system should facilitate processes across your marketing, customer support, sales, and sales partner management teams—any team that helps you sell more, improve the customer experience (CX), and boost customer retention and loyalty.

Breaking down barriers between marketing and sales initiatives is essential for a seamless customer experience (CX). In this post, we’ll explore the function and benefits of a collaborative CRM, a type of CRM that integrates these fields.

How does a collaborative CRM work?

A collaborative CRM integrates marketing automation, sales force automation, configure, price, quote (CPQ), and enterprise resource planning data to give each team a clearer picture of customers’ needs and expectations.

There are two well-known types of collaborative CRM:

1. Contact management: Sales teams use contact management systems to track account and company details, as well as every prospect interaction. Contact management systems are the foundation of collaborative sales processes since they house your first-party customer data.

2. Channel management: Channel management systems can encompass sales, customer service, and marketing systems. Channel management also focuses on distributors, wholesalers, and other partner relationships, which can expand your marketing, sales, and service reach. Partner relationship management systems make it possible for all sellers to share leads, register deals, create quotes, collaborate, and deliver results.

The benefits of a collaborative CRM

The right type of CRM for your business depends on your current pain points and future goals. The three major benefits of a collaborative CRM include:

• Improved customer service: Some customers prefer digital contact, while others prefer more traditional, over-the-phone or face-to-face interaction. Collaborative CRM can facilitate outreach through customers’ preferred channels.
• Customer data for multichannel interactions: Collaborative CRM enables you to integrate data from all channels and access data across all departments.
• Improved workflows: With access to centralized data, teams can view individual case files in real time. Collaborative CRM prevents teams from chasing down data from other departments, helps avoid manual errors, and can ultimately reduce service costs.

Find your best CRM

Collaborative CRM is just one of many options for you to explore. But what is the best CRM for your business needs? The answer is unique to your industry, your customers, your sales and business processes, and even your geographical footprint.

The trick is to find the system that will grow with you. That will be your best CRM.

Oracle Sales is an integrated CRM solution that guides customer-facing team members with intelligent recommendations to ensure they provide the right experience with the right data—every time.

See why Oracle Sales outranked Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP on Paul Greenberg’s 2022 CRM watchlist.

Or take a brief product tour to see Oracle Sales in action.