In the context of climate change afforestation is often seen as one of the most important mitigation measures. Forestry as a branch aims to improve the state of existing forests and also to increase the total forest fund. The question is what can all be done in order to reach the second objective, i.e. to increase existing forest area? By the Spatial plan of Republic Serbia forest area should be increased from the current 29% up to some 900 km² by the year 2020. For Vojvodina, where only 7% of area is under forest, priority task is to find possibilities to afforest agricultural, degraded and other categories of land so that targeted increase of 14% can be reached. While afforestation has legal and strategic support there is a growing need to consider other relevant aspects and innovative solutions within them. This paper focuses on the social science aspects and examines one possible option on how to establish and maintain relationship with the owners/users of land suitable for afforestation. This option refers to the concept of customer relationship management (CRM). The aim of the paper is to describe and understand the CRM-concept and its application in forestry. Criterion analysis has been applied in order to determine CRM-possibilities when identifying, contacting and communicating with owners/users of land sutable for afforestation as with potential customers.