A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the software where a company centralizes everything about its customers and prospects: contact details, history of exchanges, open sales opportunities, contracts, support tickets.
For a sales team, it is the daily working tool: each deal moves through a pipeline (first contact, meeting, proposal, signature), which makes it possible to forecast revenue and never miss a follow-up. For marketing, it is used to segment and measure campaigns. For support, it gives a customer's context at a glance.
The best known are Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive and Microsoft Dynamics. In a growing company, the CRM quickly becomes a central part of the information system, connected to billing, emailing and dashboards. Its quality depends above all on how rigorously teams enter data.
Why it matters when hiring
The CRM involves several jobs: salespeople use it, Sales Ops and RevOps configure and automate it, developers integrate it with the rest of the information system. For a RevOps or Sales Ops profile, ask which process the candidate tooled up and which metric improved. For an advanced Salesforce integration, look for a specialized developer: it is a skill of its own.