Offering your products or services in a proper market requires you to boast a competent Customer Database containing prospective clients' data. With a detailed document integrating the most crucial information of prospects, you can contact customers on time and exactly when they need an item or improvement in their life.

Here we discuss databases for sales processes and how these can enhance productivity and accelerate revenue. We also provide several examples and templates you can use within your company to save time, manage accounts, and design tailored products that satisfy prospects.  

A customer database, AKA client database, is a set of contacts who formerly or currently are clients of the company. A customer database also integrates contacts with a high chance of becoming leads or customers.

A customer data document might include the following information:

• Demographic information like age or gender identity;

• The company where they work;

• Role in the company;

• Email address;

• Phone number;

• Physical address;

• Purchase preferences;

• Current products.

There are six primary benefits your business can enjoy when creating a proper customer database. 

You Get More Organized Customer Profiles

A customer database allows you to organize customer information, which facilitates the process of contacting them when your sales team requires it. Since most customer databases are spreadsheet documents, you can easily set data for groups and prioritize the main channels you use to contact customers.

It Helps You to Boost Sales Productivity

With a better organization comes faster communication with current or potential customers. In other words, a document of this nature makes customer database management easy; sales executives only have to check the customer information to determine the best way to contact them. 

With more accurate data that sales team members can easily access, your organization will boost the creation of leads and successful conversions in the long term. 

Enhances your Customer Service

Organizing customer information in a proper document will allow you to understand customer needs and preferences. 

The project management database should include a section describing which products clients consume the most. This way, the next customer interaction will revolve around offering related products or services they could need. 

Highlight the channel they use the most to engage with them through it. Remember that excellent customer data management is based on the understanding that every customer is unique and has particular needs. 

The more detailed the information in your customer database, the better customer service you offer, and the more sales you will complete.

It Allows You to Create Targeted Campaigns

This benefit emanates from those mentioned above. A great customer service database lets you create tailored campaigns for demographic groups or a type of customer. 

When you manage a client database, you can separate prospects, leads, potential, and current customers to offer them specific solutions regarding their needs. 

After creating groups set according to the criteria you prefer, you can design targeted campaigns aiming at the target customer, providing solutions to satisfy them. 

For example, let's say you have an insurance company and a particular database containing the information of people who hired car insurance. These people are professionals with some purchasing power, married or with children. 

Knowing this context will allow you to create tailored marketing campaigns offering related products. 

Accelerate Revenue

Boosting sales productivity leads to an acceleration in getting revenue. With the ease of accessing customer contact information and the proper knowledge about their needs, executives can offer products with better chances of being purchased. 

In other words, using customer data will allow you to capitalize on opportunities and provide solutions for pain points in the first stages of the sales pipeline. 

This also will improve customer retention and profits. 

Provides Pipeline Visibility 

You and your sales teams can forecast future sales according to the customer's behavior. This vision regarding future events will let you plan other marketing strategies for new products to satisfy unique needs that may appear. 

You'll have a clear overview of the customer path and pipeline visibility. Then, your sales and marketing teams will know when to contact customers to measure satisfaction and offer new solutions. 

You can use three types of customer data collection to create your client database. You should understand the three of them and put them into practice.

• First-party customer data. You collect this data directly from your target audience or buyer persona. The best methods to gather first-party customer information is via surveys, or contact requests potential clients perform through your channels.   

• Second-party customer data. This data comes from a second party or partner who collects client data through its own media and channels. The partner can use several methods to generate contact records, such as surveys, giveaways, or sweepstakes. Then, it shares data with your company. 

• Third-party customer data. This data type is collected by external sources or companies specializing in generating databases for further sales analytics, email marketing, custom sales pipelines, and more. Sometimes this data may be public knowledge, such as census records. 

We've chosen five of the best customer database software you can find online. All of them are great for task management and controlling data of prospective customers. These are also great for file sharing, communication between sales team members, and more.

HubSpot Customer Relationship Management Software

This CRM is one of the best since you can update your customer database with just a few clicks. Hubspot CRM keeps data integrated as customer databases grow, creating connections between your services and data. 

Hubspot facilitates links with data and integrations, allowing you to start a conversation with customers immediately. You can also easily connect with marketing departments within your business and other teams to offer complete and comprehensive customer service.

Website: https://www.hubspot.com/

Zoho CRM

This CRM platform focuses on accelerating contact management and making the best of this data. With this client database software in the hand of your team sales, executives can relate to customers with robust automation, providing personalized customer database software solutions and a unique user experience.    

Zoho empowers executives to engage with their customers easily by connecting them promptly and with the proper message through the right channels. This method improves customer relationships, and your sales team members have more chances of closing deals. 

Website: https://www.zoho.com/crm/

Zendesk

Zendesk is a CRM software that always appears among the 10 best customer database software. Zendesk offers solutions for all-size businesses by providing better customer interactions and personalized products. This customer database software solution delivers better customer services since it can manage thousands of accounts and data, getting better insights from information.

Using Zendesk, your sales CRM team can analyze potential prospects and data sales. This way, they can discover sales opportunities and contact customers to offer them tailored decisions. With this CRM, executives ensure that prospects or leads go through the sales pipeline management, becoming clients. 

Zendesk is also great for getting advanced sales reporting, analytics, and forecasting. Not for nothing, Zendesk has one of the best customer database software tools available.  

Website: https://www.zendesk.com

Monday Sales Customer Relationship Management CRM

The customer management software of Monday is an excellent solution for sales teams that want to reduce efforts and leverage resources. It provides various tools to well-administer databases and offers unique sales solutions. This software integrates multiple CRM features considering contact details and recorded communications for planning workflow automation and marketing for specific groups and demographics. Besides, Monday CRM helps executives to get full visibility of their sales funnels for tracking leads and know exactly in what stages of the purchasing path they are. 

The most vital point of Monday CRM is recording and managing interactions and conversations with customers. It allows you to easily send a message, email, schedule calls, and log all communications.

Website: https://www.monday.com/lp/crm   

Freshsales

Freshsales is a cloud-based CRM software that empowers businesses of all sizes to close deals faster by enhancing communication between executives and customers. This software helps you to create better enterprise resource planning and prioritize and personalize customer engagement per user. This way, you can make better decisions and better understand customer behavior. Furthermore, Freshsales gives you intelligent sales insights to drive revenue. In other words, Freshsales provides a full-service CRM for lead management and outreach automation.   

Website: https://www.freshworks.com/crm/sales/

An Alternative Solution

All customer data management software we mentioned above are paid for. Still, if you have a startup and are just beginning to contact prospects, there’s an alternative. 

Microsoft Excel can be used as a free customer database software!

With MS Excel, you can easily create spreadsheet documents containing all the information you need to contact prospective clients and offer solutions! Besides, creating a customer database in this Windows application is easier since you only need to add columns for different data types.

If, at this point, you don't have Microsoft Excel among the CRM tools you commonly use, you can quickly get it here on RoyalCDKeys. The best way of doing this is by purchasing a reliable copy of the Microsoft Office Suite.  

We invite you to browse through our website and discover the various alternatives we have for you. Once you get MS Excel, you can continue with the following business processes or use one of the templates we have provided below.

• Create a row for the fields you want to include in the document, such as the client's name, age, state, city, company, phone number, email address, etcetera.

• Insert the data in the subsequent rows.

• Format cells that so data appears correctly.

• Create a table to filter information. 

Thanks to Microsoft Excel, customer data software is not mandatory. With this valuable tool, you can manage sales with just a few clicks.

If you decide to use Microsoft Excel to collect customer information and gather it in a single document, the following three templates will be precious.

Client Information Database Template

Download it from Smartsheet.

This basic template contains the primary customer information crucial for sales and marketing tools. This document’s data includes the customer's name, date of birth, home and work address, email, and social security number. But this database, contrary to other files of the same nature, integrates payment and account information. This customer database is ideal for core CRM and deal management. 

Excel Database Template

Download it from Wallstreetmojo.

This client database is perfect for small businesses that want to easily manage leads and contact them to convert them into clients. This Excel database is simpler than the previous one since it contains fewer columns and more basic information. In addition to the data mentioned in the last section, this document also contains ZIP, phone numbers, and website. Of course, you can also add data you consider relevant. 

Still, its database capabilities are similar if you only need data to contact prospects further. So, if you want a simple file resuming CRM data, this is the document for you.  

Customer Relationship Management Template

Download it from Vertex42.

Contrary to the previous two documents, this spreadsheet contains several pages with different types of information to satisfy and organize multiple sales pipelines. The first page integrates more crucial information, the estimated sale for customers and the date of the last contact. 

Thanks to this, you can plan the date of the next contact keeping in mind the sales data to offer a sales solution according to the prospect or client's needs. Other pages are intended to describe the reason for the contact. Something extraordinary about this document is that it provides lead status information, so executives can use data to improve the sales process. 

Audit Cliente’s List

Download it from Templatelab.

This template is a bit different from those mentioned above. It includes columns for the company's name, trading activities, engagement partner, and number of years serving as auditor. Although this document is for audit, you can use it to describe the behavioral data of your customers and improve your sales operation. This template also helps you quickly organize CRM records to plan customer contact tactics. Just like the previous templates, this document should only contain relevant information to complete repetitive tasks and close deals quickly.  

very successful business has a customer database to which the sales department goes to plan strategies after analyzing data. The more detailed the database is, the better chances of creating targeted strategies and products to satisfy clients' needs. So, to develop your business, you must collect data and build your own customer base to store data and have a clear buyer persona to whom you are offering your products.   

The most important at this point is performing an excellent CRM system that considers email integration, direct messages via social media, phone calls, and other strategies to address clients. The templates we've provided here will facilitate you to carry out these sales tasks by providing a better customer experience to new and loyal customers.

But offering an excellent product and service is more than just having a good database. To get other exciting templates that can help you to develop your small business and enhance sales operations, browse our blog. Here we share useful tips and templates that can be valuable for multiple activities within your company, such as web analytics, marketing automation, lead generation, forecast sales, and more.