What Does a Salesforce CRM Manager Do? (And How to Become One)

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, but what exactly each company means by that varies. 

In this article, we’re going to talk about one of many elusive job titles in the digital world — the role of the CRM Manager. Who is this person, and how do you become one? Let’s demystify this job title together.

The Origins of the Job

The role of the CRM Manager emerged as a direct response to the growing complexity of customer interactions in the business world. Its roots can be traced back to the 1980s and 1990s, when companies began shifting from purely product-centric strategies to more customer-centric approaches. 

The concept of managing customer relationships in a structured way gained momentum with the rise of database marketing in the 1980s, where businesses started leveraging data to better understand and target their customers. 

A pivotal turning point came in 1989, when the term “Customer Relationship Management” was formally introduced, and further solidified in 1993 when Thomas Siebel founded Siebel Systems, one of the first dedicated CRM software companies. 

As CRM platforms became increasingly sophisticated throughout the 1990s, particularly with the development of Salesforce in 1999, organizations recognized the need for dedicated professionals to manage, implement, and optimize these systems. 

This gave birth to the CRM Manager role, a position that combines expertise in technology, data analysis, marketing, and customer strategy. What began as a largely technical function gradually evolved into a strategic one, as businesses came to understand that effectively managing customer relationships was a key driver of long-term profitability and growth.

What It Means to be a CRM Manager Today

Who is the perfect candidate to become a CRM Manager, Lead, or Officer? 

In my opinion, it’s a person who simply can’t decide what they want to do. It’s an all-around digital professional whose main aim is to make the customer happy. It’s someone who isn’t a full-on creative marketer, but can tell the difference between good communication and bad. It’s someone who isn’t a developer, but knows how to brief an IT specialist for a new automation. 

This person is also a great project manager, since they need to juggle between different teams, tasks, and priorities. That means being a good communicator, clearly seeing the goal, and understanding who they need to speak with to get what they (and the customer) want.

In the current landscape, this person needs to be interested in how technology can simplify processes and improve customer relations, and then know how to explain it to the sales team so they don’t feel threatened. 

It’s really hard to say what specific skills are needed to excel in this role, since every skill from communication to coding sounds valuable. 

Today it means getting your hands dirty when needed, while also knowing when to step back and give space. If it sounds messy already, it’s probably because it is a messy job. You need to maneuver between different departments with different goals in order to synchronize them towards a shared vision. It’s like conducting an orchestra, where the goal is to deliver the best possible performance for the audience.

The Paradox of (Salesforce) CRM

Salesforce CRM is a product in itself, and that creates a bit of an irony when it comes to what “CRM” means across the broader Salesforce ecosystem. 

On one hand, if we are talking about the classical Salesforce CRM (or more specifically, Sales Cloud), we refer to the management of sales processes, deal progression, pipeline tracking, and account management. 

However, this is not quite what the term encompasses in all contexts. When professionals and organizations refer to CRM Managers in a Salesforce context, they can also be pointing to Salesforce Marketing, whether that involves Marketing Cloud Engagement or the more recently introduced Marketing Cloud Next. 

In this sense, the “CRM” abbreviation becomes closely associated with marketing automation, which is a discipline that covers automated customer journeys, email campaigns, audience segmentation, and personalized communications at scale.

This distinction is important to understand, as it highlights how the definition of CRM within Salesforce has expanded beyond its traditional sales-oriented roots to encompass the full spectrum of customer engagement and lifecycle management. 

A CRM Manager working within the Salesforce ecosystem can therefore often be a marketing automation specialist rather than a sales operations professional, even if both dimensions remain deeply interconnected.

How to Become a Successful Salesforce CRM Manager

There’s no university you can go to in order to study becoming a CRM manager, since this job exists at the intersection of other professions. However, that can be a benefit as well, as people from a variety of backgrounds can master it. 

If you’ve done business administration, or studied marketing, or you’ve written research papers, all of these backgrounds can be useful, but they’re not a must. Being curious, attentive, and able to switch contexts fast are more important than any university background you could have had. 

The skills you need to get the job are diverse but very realistic to acquire. To become a successful CRM Manager, you need to master a mix of hard and soft skills.

Hard Skills

There are some hard skills you need ot be a successful CRM Manager. You need to:

• Have a good understanding of how Salesforce works (the Salesforce Admin certificates can come in handy).
• Understand the concepts and foundations of data management and configuration (a Trailhead path in Data 360 can be a good start).
• Learn how to create Flows and how to leverage AI for CRM needs.
• Master dashboards and know how to read data and results (understanding the basics of Tableau can be useful).
• Have a good understanding of marketing automation (this Trailhead covers the basics).