Your CRM doesn’t hold all of your customer data. It holds the pre-sale information that’s absolutely critical to bringing in new revenue. But it won’t help you when you’re wondering if a customer’s product usage is up or down this month. That’s where a Customer Success Platform (CSP) comes in.

But the differences (and similarities) between the two platforms don’t stop there.

Data shows that a great customer experience leads directly to higher sales conversion, customer satisfaction, and even employee engagement. And a great customer experience comes from using the right tools for the problem(s) or challenge(s) you face. 

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CRM: Your pre-revenue engine

CRMs are built to handle potential customers—that is, sales. And they are powerful, offering the following advantages:

• Sales motions: Pursue leads, monitor progress, improve sales performance, simplify processes, and seize revenue opportunities.
• Initial data collection: Preserve detailed customer information, buying habits, and preferences along with positive and negative feedback, all in one place.
• Sales team productivity: Manage workflows and sales motions.

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Depending on the tool you use, you might also be able to integrate your CRM with your marketing efforts, creating powerful attribution tags and categories to inform new revenue generation. 

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CSP: A critical post-sale tool

CSPs enable the CS team to proactively assist customers in achieving their goals after they buy–or, more specifically, to achieve the goal they set that drove them to purchase in the first place. 

• Moving through the customer journey: Proactively see how customers are moving along their journey and build automations to help scale up your CS efforts without additional hiring. 
• Revenue and customer retention: Map out both the reason why someone purchased and how onboarding went–two critical factors that increase the chance of retention from the start. 
• Customer insight: Better understanding of how customers are interacting with products and services.

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A high-quality CSP should also have flowthrough integrations with your CRM system (Catalyst integrates with Salesforce, for example). This ensures that pre-sale data isn’t lost the moment someone signs a contract–and helps keep your CRM as a flow-through source of truth. It also provides a source of data you can share customer wins internally, ensuring those stories fall through the cracks. 

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Who’s the winner?

CRMs boost sales, no doubt. But that can’t be the end goal–in any SaaS or recurring revenue business, the real profit comes from customer lifetime value. In a world where it costs five times more to get a new client versus retain an existing one, you have to focus on post-revenue activities. 

CRMs can show you customer data, but they don’t have the analytical capabilities of CSPs, like product use or adoption rate of new features. Certainly, there’s a way to work around these issues in the short term. Still, those require more time and technology, so the best bet is to embrace an intuitive CSP on top of your CRM.

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CSP and CRM for the win

CSPs and CRMs are both fantastic business tools because they serve different–yet fully correlated–purposes.

And what’s more is the two platforms compound, offering more value together than they would individually. In the end, it’s not about choosing a CSP over your CRM— a good CSP will enhance your CRM’s value (and vice versa).