What a CRM is and when your business needs one

> Declaration of interest: BAI Business offers a CRM and publishes this article. It is signed by Héctor Redondo, CEO and founder of BAI Business.

Today I want to talk about what a CRM is and whether your business needs one.

A CRM is the place where you keep every customer together with everything that has happened with them: what they asked for, what you promised, when you need to call them back. It exists so that no sale is lost because someone forgot, and so that everything does not depend on your memory. The acronym (customer relationship management) hardly matters: think of an address book of customers that remembers for you.

What it is for, with an example

There are self-employed people in my family, and I have spent my whole life watching them work themselves to the bone, hour after hour. A lot of that effort goes into things that could be avoided, and losing track of customers is one of them.

Imagine a renovation business that sends ten quotes a month. Each one was requested by someone by phone, on WhatsApp or through the website. Fifteen days go by. Who replied? Who needed another call? What price was given to each one? If the answer is spread across three places, two of those ten quotes are lost without anyone deciding to lose them. (This is an invented example to explain the idea, not a real customer.)

A CRM solves that with three very simple things:

1. One record per customer, with their whole history: calls, messages, quotes, appointments.
2. Follow-up on every sale, with its next action and its owner: "call on Thursday", "send the contract".
3. Automatic input: what arrives through a form, a booking or the chat is saved in the record by itself, with nobody copying it by hand.

How many companies use one

According to Spain's National Statistics Institute (INE), 34.5% of companies in Spain with 10 or more employees and an internet connection use customer relationship management software (survey on ICT use in companies, first-quarter 2025 data, accessed on 11 October 2026). The same report gives 63.6% for enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, the kind that handles invoices, purchases and stock. Put plainly: most companies already have somewhere to keep their money, and one in three has somewhere to keep their customers.

That figure is for companies with 10 or more employees. For those with fewer than 10, that INE release does not measure CRM.

How to tell you need one

If you recognise yourself in two of these four, you already need one:

• The same customer is on your phone, in a spreadsheet and in your email, and nobody remembers what was promised.
• You have lost a sale because you did not call back in time.
• You copy the data from every form or every message by hand.
• When a new customer arrives, it is not clear who looks after them.

What to look for when choosing one

Do not look at the list of features. Look at four things:

• That it is genuinely easy to use. A CRM that forces you to fill in fields by hand is abandoned after three weeks. Nobody wants a system that creates more work than it removes.
• That data arrives by itself from your website, your bookings and your chat.
• That every sale has its next action and an owner, and that it warns you when a deadline passes.
• That it talks to everything else. A CRM cut off from your diary and your invoicing only changes where you copy the data.

When you do not need one

Not every business needs one. If you sell once to each customer and there is nothing to follow up afterwards, or if you have ten repeat customers you know by heart, a good spreadsheet is enough. The day you wonder who "that customer" was, it is no longer enough.

What we have built at BAI

I run my own customers in BAI's CRM, so I am telling you this from the inside. According to what we publish on our website, each customer has a record with their history and a sale that moves through your stages with a date and an owner for the next action. Forms, bookings and the chat create the record by themselves, new customers are assigned to the right person with a deadline to respond, and artificial intelligence summarises each sale. You can upload your customer spreadsheet and duplicates are merged by email and phone.

If after reading this a spreadsheet is enough for you, good for you.

What to do now

Try this ten-minute test: write down on a piece of paper how many customers you have open and, for each one, what the next action is and who owns it. If you cannot answer for half of them, you know what you are missing.

If you want to see how we do it, it is explained in CRM for your business. And if you are torn between a CRM and an ERP, the comparison is in CRM or ERP: differences and which one your SME needs.

How we checked this

I read the INE figures directly in its press release (ICT use table by region, total row) on 11 October 2026. What I say about BAI comes from the published pages of our website. I wrote it with the help of artificial intelligence from the cited sources and from what we use at BAI; I sign it myself.

Sources

• INE, "Encuesta sobre el uso de TIC y del comercio electrónico en las empresas. Año 2024 - Primer trimestre 2025": https://www.ine.es/dyngs/Prensa/ETICCE20241T2025.htm (accessed on 11 October 2026). Percentages over companies with 10 or more employees and an internet connection.
• Description of BAI's CRM: published page CRM for your business.