Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and content management systems (CMS) are critical in day-to-day business processes. However, despite their similar importance, they’re very different technologies.
In this article, we’ll explore the differences between CRM vs. CMS solutions and the key benefits of each to help you decide if one or both of these platforms can contribute toward your business goals.
CRM vs. CMS: The key differences
A CRM helps you manage customer data while improving visibility over your sales pipeline. A CMS makes it easier to manage website content without coding knowledge.
CRM and CMS platforms are both cornerstone business systems. Each offers benefits that help streamline operations and drive more leads or revenue.
However, they have different purposes, functionality and key use cases. Both add value and create opportunities for optimization at different points in the marketing and sales process.
Here’s a head-to-head comparison of CRM vs. CMS solutions:
CRM | CMS |
| Core purpose: To manage customer data and streamline marketing and sales funnels. | Core purpose: To make building, maintaining and updating websites easier. |
Key features
| Key features
|
Use cases
| Use cases
|
Key users
| Key users
|
Examples
| Examples
|
The differences mean that CRM platforms and CMS platforms aren’t mutually exclusive. Many businesses need both.
What is a CRM?
A CRM is a software solution that helps you manage customer data and boost sales efficiency.
CRMs centralize information about your leads and customers in an easily accessible hub. They also offer sales pipeline management features to visually track leads through the funnel.
Additionally, most CRM platforms include features for automating repetitive tasks and analyzing sales performance.
The term CRM can also refer to the process of customer relationship management. Accordingly, CRM technology is often referred to as a CRM platform, CRM system, CRM software or CRM solution.
What is a CMS?
CMS software allows you to build, edit and manage websites without writing code from scratch.
Many CMS platforms offer user-friendly interfaces and drag-and-drop page builders that simplify content creation and website design. Extensions also allow you to add functionality, like e-commerce storefronts or SEO tools.
Small business owners, therefore, don’t have to hire developers to launch a functional and attractive website. Maintaining a website is also easier as it reduces the technical knowledge required to manage website pages.
CRM benefits and features
Here are the key features of CRM tools and the benefits they offer throughout the marketing, sales and customer management process.
Customer database
CRMs are a central repository for contact information, including personal details, past interactions and purchase history. This data can help you build stronger relationships with leads or existing customers.
You can add CRM contact information manually or import it from spreadsheets or other tools using integrations. Your sales teams can then use this data to research leads before contacting them.
It offers useful information, from simple details like the lead’s name to more sophisticated insights like the best channel to contact them. All this helps salespeople tailor their approach to nurturing potential customers.
The customer information database also helps you build better relationships with existing customers and identify new revenue opportunities.
For example, your CRM might indicate that you haven’t contacted a customer in 12 months, prompting a team member to reach out for a check-in. Using an overview of that customer’s previous purchases, they can treat the check-in as an opportunity for cross-selling or upselling products.
Data from Zippia found that 47% of respondents said a CRM improves customer retention, while 45% said it improves sales revenue and 39% said it improves upselling or cross-selling success.
Workflow automation
CRMs offer automation features that improve sales and marketing efficiency. They also reduce the time teams spend on repetitive administrative tasks, allowing them to spend more time on important activities, like improving the customer experience.
CRM automation features can simplify various elements of your sales cycle, from initial customer data collection to post-sale follow-up processes.
For example, sales teams using Pipedrive’s CRM can get valuable data about new leads in one click with the Smart Contact Data button. It searches the web for information like contact details, reducing the burden on salespeople to do manual research.
Once you’ve set up the automated lead distribution feature, a newly added lead is assigned to the right team member based on predefined rules, meaning they can move faster to make first contact.
Pipedrive also offers sales workflow automation to streamline elements of the sales cycle. Automated rules can advance a lead to a deal at the right time or send a follow-up email after a nurturing call.
These sales automations are highly configurable. You have complete control over how and when they work, so your salesforce can leverage them in a way that fits their process perfectly, minimizing friction in the sales cycle and creating opportunities to generate more revenue.
Our State of Sales and Marketing Report 2021/22 highlights the potential benefits of CRM automation. Respondents who automated sales and marketing tasks were 16% more likely to hit their targets.
Pipeline management
CRMs simplify sales pipeline management. They feature customizable visual interfaces to boost visibility over leads across all stages of the funnel, making it easier for your sales teams to stay on top of new contacts and deals in progress.
Below is an example of the visual pipeline representation for sales-focused CRMs like Pipedrive.
You can choose from standard pipeline templates included in your CRM and tailor them to fit your sales process.
Alternatively, you can build your own pipelines from scratch to mirror particularly unique sales cycles, letting you add bespoke pipeline stages and custom fields, for example.
Pipedrive’s CRM also allows you to create multiple pipelines to reflect different product or lead types. As a result, distinct sales teams can each have their own dedicated pipeline.
A clear, user-friendly top-down view of the entire sales pipeline empowers salespeople to manage individual leads and deals more effectively.
Most importantly, they can move leads to the next stage at the right time, minimizing missed sales opportunities.
The pipeline management features in Pipedrive’s CRM also benefit from automation. You can add rules for diverse automatic trigger-based actions such as deal progression, reassignment or closure.
Lead tracking
A CRM allows you to collate, target and track leads across their journey through the sales funnel. It’s easier for sales teams to keep leads warm and take the right actions at the right time, maximizing deal success rates.
In sophisticated sales CRMs like Pipedrive, this lead tracking begins before the contact is even qualified as a lead.
You can implement features like Pipedrive’s Chatbot and Web Forms on websites to engage visitors, pre-qualify prospects and automatically import information into the contact database.
Collect early-stage leads in the Leads Inbox, where they can be filtered, sorted and eventually qualified.
Qualified leads can then easily be converted into deals, at which point they move into the pipeline management view. From there, sales teams can track them throughout each stage of the pipeline, from the first point of contact to the deal being closed.
The platform collects data in the contact’s database entry along the journey. This gives sales teams a valuable resource to draw from as they build lead management strategies to nurture leads toward conversion.
Sales analytics
CRM platforms empower sales teams through data delivered by detailed sales analytics features. These features provide a comprehensive overview of sales performance and offer information that can drive improved conversion rates and revenue.
Sales CRM analytics, like Pipedrive’s Insights feature, revolve around user-friendly interfaces that visualize data and provide automatic sales performance insights.
They pull from the customer database and pipeline manager to report on metrics like:
Leads created
Deal win rate
Average time to close
Revenue generated
You can view the data on a business-wide level or filter to a more specific view. Sales managers can then use the information to compare the performance of different teams, for example.
You can also feed the data into CRM sales forecasting features to project future revenue and build a clear picture of what deals sales teams must prioritize to meet their targets.
Like other CRM features, sales analytics dashboards like Pipedrive’s Insights are highly customizable. You can create custom goals and reports to track and analyze the data that matters most to your business.
You can also use segmentation strategies to get insights into specific groups of leads.
Custom dashboards showing sales performance by deal size, for example, can clarify what type of deal your sales team is best at winning.
CMS benefits and features
Here are some of the key features of CMS systems and the benefits they can provide to give you more control over your website.
Content management tools
A CMS revolves around content management tools that allow users to create, edit and publish website content. These tools are intuitive and user-friendly, with a visual interface and no coding knowledge required.
Managing your website content is easier because you don’t have to offload minor content publishing or editing tasks to a development team. Instead, your product, marketing or sales teams can make changes directly.
You can grant permissions per user to give individual users an appropriate level of control and limit users to specific activities like editing content, publishing new pages or making suggestions.
The content management tools in a CMS also allow teams and content creators to collaborate seamlessly on new projects.
Multiple users can edit draft pages together. Revision tracking and version history features make managing changes remotely and asynchronously easy.
Your CMS can also become a hub for multimedia digital assets. The built-in image and video galleries can collate visual digital content. Users can search through these galleries and pull directly from them when creating new pages.
Themes and templates
CMS platforms include themes and templates that define your website’s visual appearance and layout.
Themes determine stylistic elements with pre-designed font families, color schemes and mobile responsiveness guidelines. You can customize the default theme settings to create a website that matches your brand.
Templates provide predefined layouts for specific content types like blog posts, product pages or contact forms. They further reduce the need to be able to code to build a functional, stylish website. They also ensure consistency across similar page types and content elements.
CMSs come preloaded with diverse default themes and templates, which you can tweak to suit specific needs or preferences. They also often feature marketplaces where you can download more sophisticated or specialized themes and templates.
It gives you an array of content styles to explore. You can also switch or customize themes or templates without erasing underlying content, making changing your website’s look and feel easier.
SEO tools
Many CMS platforms have built-in SEO tools that help you optimize your website for search engines. These tools make enhancing content and fixing technical issues easier, boosting your online presence and generating more organic traffic.
Different CMS options provide varying levels of SEO functionality. Available tools range from basic to sophisticated. The most common features include:
Metadata fields to edit title tags and meta descriptions on a per-page basis
Editable URL fields to ensure new pages have descriptive, SEO-friendly URLs
Content optimization suggestions that analyze how well you’ve optimized content for target keywords
Image optimization tools, including automatic image compression and alt text fields
Page redirect managers that allow users to create and manage SEO-friendly redirects
Automatically generated XML or HTML sitemaps that update when you add new pages to the site
Robots.txt management tools that allow for customization of website crawlability and indexability
Even if your CRM doesn’t have these features by default, you can usually add them through extensions.
Most CMSs integrate with third-party SEO software, opening up more advanced features to support organic marketing efforts, like backlink analysis tools in the CMS interface.
Extensions/integrations
You can upgrade your CMS platform with extensions and integrations, significantly extending your CMS functionality and offering access to specialized features.
Extensions are downloadable CMS add-ons, also known as plugins, available through marketplaces on most major CMS platforms. The WordPress plugin marketplace, for example, features over 59,000 free plugins.
Some extensions are simple tools, like Yoast SEO, which offers SEO recommendations to improve organic visibility. Others are sophisticated platforms in their own right, like WooCommerce, which offers full e-commerce functionality.
Alongside extensions, most CMSs offer a range of integrations that allow you to connect to other software through user-friendly APIs.
APIs are another way to improve website functionality, providing seamless two-way connectivity between your CMS and CRM, email marketing automation platform, third-party e-commerce system, and analytics software.
The features a CMS offers out-of-the-box are only the tip of the iceberg. Their functionality can increase dramatically with the right combination of extensions and integrations.
Website analytics
Some CMS platforms offer built-in website analytics features that help you measure and analyze your website’s performance.
Analytics features can track a variety of metrics, including:
Page views
Unique visitors
Bounce/exit rate
Session duration
Conversion rate
Analytics features built directly into a CMS are useful because website managers and other team members can access them seamlessly with CMS permissions.
The data maximizes the chances that you can take action promptly, helping you improve your marketing campaigns.
However, even CMS platforms that don’t offer built-in analytics allow users to connect to third-party analytics platforms like Google Analytics or Hotjar through integrations or extensions.
How to integrate your CMS and CRM
You don’t have to choose between a CRM and a CMS – the two technologies work perfectly together. You can connect your CRM and CMS using integrations available on your CRM’s marketplace or with a third-party tool like Zapier.
Connecting the two opens up many potential benefits that enhance their functionality.
For example, with an integrated CRM and CMS, leads generated through web forms or other conversion pathways on your website can be seamlessly imported into your contact management database.
Doing this ensures sales teams can see every lead generated through a website immediately, reducing the delay before they can start nurturing them through the sales cycle.
You can also use CRM data to inform strategy for personalized content delivered through the CMS, helping boost user engagement, improve conversion performance and generate more leads.
Most CRMs offer direct CMS integration functionality through their marketplace. Pipedrive, for example, integrates natively with a range of CMSs, including Shopify and Wix.
Alternatively, you can use a Zapier CRM integration to connect your CRM with diverse CMSs, including WordPress.
You can also integrate a CRM and CMS with other common business tools, from social media platforms to project management software.
Final thoughts
When comparing CMS vs. CRM, it’s important to remember that both technologies serve different purposes. Each one is fundamental to modern business needs and processes.
To get the best from your sales and marketing teams, you should use both platforms together. An integrated CMS and CRM setup has benefits you can unlock throughout the funnel.
The benefits mean a CRM and CMS can support your business operations and drive consistent business growth.
