CRM software can provide valuable benefits to small and medium-sized businesses by improving marketing effectiveness, increasing sales over time, and decreasing sales and marketing costs. Recent surveys show that most companies see CRM as critical to their sales and marketing efforts, and that top SMB performers leverage customer data collected from initiatives to make better decisions and consolidate customer knowledge in their CRM solution. Additional benefits of CRM include improving customer retention by 27%, increasing productivity by 32%, and increasing forecast accuracy by 44%.