CRM

A CRM is software that stores and manages a business's interactions with individual leads and customers, typically owned by sales.

The core distinction from a CDP: a CRM is built around known, named individuals and their specific interaction history (a sales rep's notes, a support ticket, a deal stage) — it's fundamentally a system of record for one-to-one relationships, not a system for large-scale audience segmentation or anonymous behavioral data.

Marketing and sales teams frequently argue about CRM data quality because both teams write to and read from the same system with different needs — marketing wants clean, complete lead source and campaign data; sales wants fast, low-friction data entry during a call. Neither optimizes cleanly for the other without deliberate process design.