About half of Brazil’s online advertisers say they don’t use CRM

The striking part of the result is how evenly the two clear answers divide. An estimated 49.1% of online advertisers explicitly reported no CRM use, while 46.2% reported use. The remaining 4.7% did not know or did not answer the CRM question. Keeping that third group visible matters: uncertainty about a response is different from a clear no.

The figures are weighted estimates for the survey’s covered businesses, rather than simple percentages of the people interviewed. The advertiser group contains 1,710 released enterprise records. Those records contribute differently to the estimates because the survey weights account for its design & adjustments. The result therefore does not mean that 49.1% of 1,710 questionnaire rows were marked no.^[2][3]

There is also sampling uncertainty. The 95% interval for the explicit no response runs from 45.2% to 52.9%; for reported use, it runs from 42.3% to 50.2%. “About half” is an appropriate summary. The figures describe a near split, with uncertainty around both shares.^[4]

For a business owner, the useful question is what happens between an inquiry arriving & someone agreeing to handle it. An advertising budget buys a chance to be considered. It does not specify which person should reply, where a useful detail belongs or when the next step should happen. Those are decisions the business still needs to make.

Among Internet-using businesses that explicitly said they did not pay for online advertising, estimated CRM use was 19.7%, with a 95% interval of 17.1% to 22.4%. In that same group, 77.3% explicitly reported no CRM use & 3.0% had an unresolved CRM response. All three answers remain part of the denominator. This comparison group contains 2,153 released enterprise records.

The difference in reported CRM use between advertisers & explicit nonadvertisers was 26.5 percentage points. Its 95% interval was 21.6 to 31.4 percentage points. Percentage points describe the distance between two shares, here 46.2% & 19.7%; they do not describe an increase in revenue or a change experienced by an individual business.^[4]

These are different businesses observed in the survey, not businesses randomly assigned to advertise. They may differ in size, industry, resources, customer relationships or many other ways. The analysis does not show whether advertising encouraged CRM use, CRM use encouraged advertising, or other circumstances contributed to both.^[7]

It is tempting to treat the contrast as a software recommendation. A more useful reading is that advertising & customer-information work often coexist, while many advertisers still report no CRM application. For your own team, that is a reason to examine the handoff. It is not evidence that buying a tool will improve ad performance, or that every business should adopt the same process.

The survey asked whether the business had used an application to manage customer information, also called CRM, during the previous 12 months. It did not inspect the company’s files, watch a sales team work or test whether an inquiry received a reply. A no answer cannot establish that the company keeps no customer records.^[2]

Removing the unresolved CRM answers would answer a different question: the balance among businesses whose respondent gave a clear yes or no. It would no longer describe the full advertiser group. We retained those answers in the published shares so that a reader can see how much information is unresolved, without treating uncertainty as either adoption or nonuse.

A shared spreadsheet may be a reasonable way for a small team to coordinate a manageable set of inquiries. Another business may need an application because several people work on the same accounts, responsibilities change frequently or access needs to be controlled more closely. These are practical choices to assess locally. Neither arrangement was rated for quality in this study.

The reverse distinction matters too. Reporting CRM use does not tell us whether the information is current, whether staff consult it or whether it connects with the advertising account. A business can have software & still leave a conversation without an owner. The survey does not measure that situation, but it is a useful possibility to check when reviewing your own process.

Start with the work your team needs to do. Can someone find the inquiry, understand what the person asked, see who is responsible & identify the next action? Answering those questions can reveal a concrete change to make. It also prevents a conversation about software categories from replacing a conversation about how work actually moves through the team.

Choose a recent inquiry that your team can review appropriately. Follow it from the advertising response or contact channel to the next business action. You are checking your own workflow, rather than trying to recreate the survey or classify your business from one example.

First, establish where the inquiry arrives. It might reach a website form, an inbox or a conversation on a social platform. Record enough context to recognize the request later, including the campaign or source when it is actually known. If the source is unclear, leave it unclear rather than giving an advertisement credit because it happened to be running.

Next, look for an agreed place to keep useful information. The record should help the next person act without searching through unrelated messages. A short summary of the question, the latest response & a link to the appropriate working context may be more useful than copying an entire conversation into another system. Keep access & the information retained consistent with the business’s own requirements.

Then identify responsibility. A visible name or team role makes a handoff easier to understand than a note saying “sales to follow up.” Finally, state an action & a suitable review time. “Send the requested delivery information tomorrow” gives the next person something concrete to do. A date alone does not explain the job.

The four steps below are a practical checklist. They are not a process measured by TIC Empresas, & the illustration does not represent surveyed businesses or measured frequencies.

Consider a fictional Brazilian wholesaler with 12 people working in the business. It promotes products online & receives 20 inquiries during an example week. The marketing coordinator sees the advertising activity, while a sales coordinator handles product questions. The business currently uses a shared worksheet. Every detail in this example is illustrative; it is not a survey record or a measured result.^[8]

One inquiry asks whether a particular product can be delivered before an event. The marketing coordinator adds an entry labeled E01, notes the requested timing & assigns the sales coordinator to check availability. The next action is to reply after the stock check. The worksheet links to the original conversation so the coordinator can see the wording if needed.

A second inquiry concerns a different product & has no reliable campaign identifier. Its source remains “unknown.” That avoids turning the worksheet into an invented attribution report. A third customer has already received the requested information; the record says what was sent & whether another action was agreed. The team does not assign the same status to every person who has contacted it.

At the review, the owner asks whether each active entry has a responsible person & a next action. If the team can answer consistently using its worksheet, the immediate improvement may be a clearer routine rather than new software. If entries are repeatedly hard to find or two people cannot tell who should act, the owner can investigate that specific difficulty & consider a tool that addresses it.

Nothing in the example establishes that all 20 inquiries require the same treatment, that a sale will result or that CRM would change the outcome. Its purpose is to make the handoff visible. The survey finding supplies a reason to ask about that handoff; the fictional case shows one way a team could examine it.

Use the fields below in an existing worksheet, a CRM application or another agreed place. They are available here without a sign-up. Keep the form short enough that the people responsible will maintain it, & add detail only when it changes the next useful action.

Inquiry reference: give the request a short identifier that the team can recognize.

Received: note when it arrived & which contact channel received it.

Source: record the campaign or other source if known. Use “unknown” when the evidence is missing.

Request: summarize what the person wants & any timing they have supplied.

Owner: name the person or role responsible for the next action.

Current position: state what has actually happened, such as “availability being checked” or “requested information sent.”

Next action: describe the task, who will perform it & when it should be reviewed.

Working context: link to the appropriate conversation or file, with access suitable for the team.

Closure: note the outcome that is actually known, or why there is no further agreed action.

For the fictional E01 inquiry, the entry could read: “Delivery timing requested; sales coordinator checking stock; reply after the check tomorrow; source unknown.” That is useful even without a prediction about whether the customer will buy. Do not turn “information sent” into “sale completed,” or an unknown source into an attributed advertising result.

Agree which statuses the team will use & what they mean. Check one completed handoff together before expanding the form. If a field is routinely left blank, find out whether it is unnecessary, difficult to establish or missing a responsible person. Adding more columns does not by itself resolve any of those problems.

These findings come from the official TIC Empresas 2025 release, produced by Cetic.br/NIC.br. The covered population consists of active formal private Brazilian enterprises with at least 10 persons working in them, in the survey’s covered industries. The enterprise is the unit, even when it has several locations. The findings are not estimates for US businesses, informal firms, businesses with 1–9 people or solo creators.^[1]

The survey’s interviews took place from February 2025 through January 2026. Questions concerned the preceding 12 months for each interview, rather than one identical calendar period for every respondent. Paid Internet advertising included search, social networks & other websites. There is no Meta-only measure in this comparison.

We analyzed the exact 4,171 released records. Of these, 4,150 reported Internet use. The two comparison groups were the 1,710 enterprises reporting paid Internet advertising & 2,153 reporting none. Another 282 did not know whether the business paid for advertising & 5 did not answer that question; they were outside this contrast. The 21 other records were outside the Internet-user question group. The producer reports 4,174 completed interviews; the reviewed sources do not explain the three-record difference.^[3]

The reported response rate was 8%. That is about participation in the survey, not the share answering the CRM question. The released data have undergone statistical confidentiality treatment. Weighting & the supplied uncertainty calculations do not remove every possible effect of that treatment, nonresponse, reporting or coverage.^[1][4]

We also retained a small benchmark mismatch & an unresolved year label in the source workbooks. The methods download explains the change to our criteria for using the source, made before these CRM comparisons, preserves the original failed check & provides the exact comparisons. It does not claim that every strict benchmark passed or explain the mismatch as rounding.^[5][6]

The study supports a narrower, more useful discussion than “advertisers need CRM.” About half of the covered advertisers explicitly reported no CRM application, while reported use was much more common among advertisers than among explicit nonadvertisers. That combination is worth investigating in a business. It does not choose the right system for that business.

If your team already has a workable shared record, check whether responsibilities & next actions are clear before adding another tool. If the difficulty is access, search, repeated handoffs or a growing number of related conversations, describe that difficulty plainly. Compare possible solutions against the work that needs to happen, including the option of improving the existing arrangement.

Keep the advertising review connected to that conversation without inventing a performance claim. Our social media campaign template can help set out what a campaign is trying to achieve. The social media audit template can help review the surrounding account workflow. The ROI calculator is a separate aid for explicit cost & return assumptions; this survey supplies no return estimate to enter into it.^[9]

A useful next step is one real inquiry that the team can trace from arrival to an agreed action. What you learn from that review belongs to your business. The Brazil survey provides context & a question to ask, while the answer about your next operating change needs evidence from your own work.