Examples of CRM by Use, and the Record Every One Needs (2026)

Examples of CRM at a glance

Common examples of CRM systems include Salesforce Sales Cloud and Pipedrive for managing a sales pipeline, HubSpot for running marketing and sales on one database, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales for larger organizations. A CRM (customer relationship management) system stores the companies you sell to, the people inside them and every interaction with them, so a team can see who to call next and what is likely to close. The short definition of what a CRM holds is in our glossary entry on CRM data.

Grouped by use, in alphabetical order, without ranking:

Each of these CRM systems does five things:

• Stores companies and people as linked records: accounts and the contacts who work there.
• Tracks deals or cases through stages, so the team knows what is open and what is next.
• Logs activity: emails, calls, meetings and notes, attached to the person and the account.
• Automates follow-up: reminders, tasks, sequences or assignment rules.
• Reports on pipeline, revenue, activity and segments, from the fields stored in the records.

CRM systems differ in which of these five jobs comes first, how much can be configured, and who they are built for. Vendor facts quoted in parts 02 to 06 come from each vendor's own product pages and documentation, checked on October 6, 2026.

Examples of CRM for managing a sales pipeline

A pipeline CRM is built around deals moving through stages: first contact, qualified, proposal, negotiation, won or lost. Reps log calls and emails against the deal, and managers build the forecast from the stages. For many small and mid-size sales teams, this is what "we need a CRM" means.

• Freshsales is the sales CRM from Freshworks. It refuses two contacts with the same primary email and two accounts with the same name.
• monday CRM describes itself as revenue execution that goes live in minutes, for teams that want to shape their own pipeline without an administrator.
• Pipedrive is built around activity-based selling: the pipeline view and the next activity on each deal are the center of the product. On import, you choose at the last step how duplicates are handled.
• Salesforce Sales Cloud covers the same needs with far more configuration. Duplicate handling needs both a matching rule and a duplicate rule; one without the other does nothing.
• Zoho CRM describes itself as an AI CRM. Its import refuses rows where a mandatory field is empty, such as the last name of a lead.

A pipeline record looks much the same in all of them. Take a deal called "Acme, 40 seats, Q4": it sits at the proposal stage, it is attached to the account Acme Inc. and to two contacts, the head of sales who will sign and the sales ops manager who runs the trial. The next activity is a call on Thursday. The forecast uses the amount and the stage; the manager's report splits the pipeline by the account's industry and headcount. Every one of those numbers depends on fields that someone, at some point, had to fill.

What goes wrong in practice. The pipeline view works on day one. Three months later, deals are attached to a contact who left the company, the same account exists twice because one rep typed "Acme Inc" and another "ACME", and half the contacts have no job title, so nobody can filter on decision makers. The CRM blocks some duplicates on the keys you give it; it cannot know that your champion changed jobs last month. Derrick takes care of the stale and empty part before the forecast relies on it, by refreshing each contact's current title and company from their LinkedIn profile.

Examples of CRM for marketing and lead generation

A marketing-led CRM puts the contact database, forms, email campaigns and lead scoring next to the sales pipeline, so a lead can be followed from the first form fill to the signed deal without a handoff between two tools.

• Creatio presents itself as a CRM and workflow platform for marketing, sales and service, configured without code. Duplicate search is on by default for accounts, contacts and leads, across the database and when a record is saved.
• HubSpot runs marketing, sales and service on one CRM. It deduplicates contacts on email and companies on the primary domain name, so importing a known email updates the existing contact.

What goes wrong in practice. Forms collect what people are willing to type: a first name, an email, sometimes a company name. Job title, company size and industry are usually missing, so lead scoring runs on the email domain and little else. Our guide to lead scoring software shows which criteria a score needs before it means anything. The fix is to add the missing fields after the form: with Derrick, title and company come from the person's LinkedIn profile at 1 credit per profile, and headcount and industry from the company's LinkedIn page at 1 credit per company. If the form gave you only a name and an email, finding the LinkedIn profile URL is a separate first step, with its own cost.

Examples of CRM for customer service

A service CRM is organized around cases or tickets rather than deals: a customer reports a problem, an agent picks it up, the case is tracked until it is closed, and the history stays on the account so the next agent knows what happened.

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is Microsoft's customer service application in the Dynamics 365 family, next to Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Sugar Serve is SugarCRM's customer service product, covering case management, omnichannel support and self-service, next to its sales product, Sugar Sell.

What goes wrong in practice. Service teams depend on matching an incoming email to the right customer. When the same person exists twice, or the account has three spellings, the case lands on the wrong record and the agent does not see the history. Two habits help: merge duplicates before they reach the CRM (Find Duplicates in the Derrick sidebar for Google Sheets does this), and keep emails and employers current, which Derrick does with email verification on paid plans and a profile refresh, so the record a case lands on is up to date.

Enterprise CRM examples

Enterprise CRM systems serve organizations where several business units, regions or legal entities share the same customers. They add permissions, governance, account hierarchies and heavy integrations.

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales tracks accounts and contacts from lead to order, with default duplicate detection rules for accounts, contacts and leads that can run during import.
• Oracle Fusion Cloud Sales (also known as Oracle CX Sales) brings sales, quoting, order management, billing and renewals onto one platform. Its basic duplicate checking for accounts and contacts has to be turned on.
• SAP Sales Cloud is SAP's CRM for sales automation, guided selling and forecasting.

What goes wrong in practice. At this size, the hard part is the account hierarchy. A customer buys from three of your subsidiaries; if its French entity is loaded as a separate company with no link to the parent, the group's revenue is split across two accounts and the key account manager underestimates it. Our comparison of enterprise CRM software covers the platforms, list prices and the data test to run before you sign.

Industry-specific CRM examples

Some vendors adapt their CRM to one industry, with the objects and processes it needs: quotes and distributors for manufacturers, policies for insurers, matters for law firms. Three examples from manufacturing:

• Creatio has a manufacturing page presenting its platform for industrial sales.
• Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud is an industry product sold separately from Sales Cloud.
• SugarCRM markets an offer for manufacturers, with a predictive module that reads order data from the ERP to flag reorder and cross-sell opportunities.

For industrial sales teams, our guide to manufacturing CRM lists eight options with public prices, the split between CRM and ERP, and the account record an industrial seller needs.

Where the types of CRM fit

Salesforce's CRM glossary describes four types of CRM: operational (running daily sales, marketing and service work), analytical (finding patterns in customer data), collaborative (sharing customer information across teams) and strategic (long-term relationships through reporting and personalization). Most of the examples above combine several types, and every type reads the same records, which is the subject of the next part.

The same account record in three CRMs

These CRMs share three objects: an account (the company), contacts (the people) attached to it, and deals or cases attached to both. The labels change from one CRM system to another, and so do the keys they use to spot duplicates.

The keys are not the same everywhere. HubSpot matches companies on their domain; Freshsales and Zoho CRM match accounts on the name; Dynamics 365 uses rules on email and names. Email is the most common key for people. A company with no domain, or a person with no work email, gives the CRM nothing reliable to match on, and that is how the same record gets created twice.

These are the fields we would want on every record before it enters a pipeline or a report:

• On the company: legal name, website domain, LinkedIn company URL, industry, headcount band, headquarters country.
• On the person: full name, current job title, current company, LinkedIn profile URL, verified work email.
• The link: each person attached to the right company, so activity and deals roll up to the account.

Our guide to contact management covers the rules that keep one person and one company per record.

Is a spreadsheet (Excel, Google Sheets) a CRM?

No. Excel or Google Sheets can hold a list of accounts and contacts, and for a very small team with a few dozen accounts it can be enough. What a spreadsheet lacks is everything around the rows: no activity history, no reminders, no permissions per record, and no link between a person and a company other than a column you keep in sync by hand. A common trigger to move to a CRM is follow-ups starting to slip, or a second person editing the same list.

A spreadsheet stays useful next to a CRM for one job: preparing data before it goes in. With the Derrick sidebar in Google Sheets, you can remove duplicates with Find Duplicates, which is free and unlimited, enrich the rows, and then import a clean file into your CRM. Our guide to exporting Google Sheets data to your CRM walks through the import step. If you would rather skip the spreadsheet, the same enrichment runs in the Derrick web app on an imported CSV.

What goes wrong in every CRM: the data

The problems described in parts 02 to 05 come back to the same three causes:

1. Empty fields. Records created from a form, a business card or a quick manual entry rarely have job title, industry or headcount. Segments, scoring and territory rules then run on blanks.
2. Duplicates. The same company under two spellings, the same person with a personal and a work email. Built-in duplicate rules only catch what their keys allow.
3. People who left. Contacts change jobs, and the record keeps the old title and company. The CRM has no way to know.

How fast records go stale, and what it costs, is measured in our CRM data quality report. These three problems start outside the CRM, so no CRM on this page can fix them by itself.

Derrick is not a CRM, and it is not one of the examples above. It is the data layer that keeps the records complete, whichever CRM you use. A typical cleanup, in the Derrick web app:

1. Export your contacts and accounts from your CRM as a CSV and import the file into the web app.
2. Refresh people. Enrich Leads reads each LinkedIn profile URL and fills current job title, current company and location, at 1 credit per profile. A changed company tells you the contact has left.
3. Complete companies. Enrich Companies fills industry, headcount, headquarters and website from each LinkedIn company page, at 1 credit per company. Both steps need your LinkedIn account connected through the Derrick Chrome extension.
4. Check emails. Email Verification costs 1 credit per email, and Email Finder costs 5 credits per email found, nothing when no email is found. Both need a paid plan, from STANDARD at 20 euros a month.
5. Import the file back into your CRM as an update, matching on the email for people and on the key your CRM uses for companies, so records are updated rather than duplicated.

On a list of 500 contacts, the profile refresh costs 1 credit per profile, which fits in the 10,000 credits of the STANDARD plan with room left for the company step. The free plan gives 100 credits a month with no card, enough to test the profile and company refresh on a sample. If your CRM should stay current without exports, the API and the Derrick MCP (for Claude and other AI assistants) are included from the PLUS plan at 47.50 euros a month.

Choosing among these CRM examples

Start from what your team does every day rather than from the longest feature list: a pipeline team, a marketing-led team, a support team, a large group or an industrial seller will each recognize themselves in one group above. Shortlist two or three CRM systems from that group, then test each one on 200 of your own records instead of demo data, and look at how many land complete, duplicated or orphaned. More guides on keeping CRM records complete are in the CRM data enrichment section, and every Derrick feature is listed on the features page.