A CRM is one of the most beneficial assets that a company can have. If you are investing the time and money into a CRM, you would want to get a ROI (return on your investment) and ensure that money is well spent.
How can you be sure that you are getting the best ROI from your CRM?
According to a recent study by Nucleus Research, every dollar spent on CRM implementation returns as much as $40 per $1 spent in sales revenue!! With the CRM Market growing so quickly, you cannot ignore not only the benefits of a CRM. Companies are getting out of their CRM for the industry to become such an asset to millions of business owners around the world. Business owners are seeing the ROI that others are getting from their CRM’s and wanting the same for the company. It is projected that that CRM industry will be worth $81.9 billion dollars by 2025. Investing in a CRM solution will help grow revenues, cut operating costs, and boost IT efficiencies. However, many businesses need help quantifying the ROI of implementing CRM software.
So how do you calculate the ROI of your CRM?
Measuring the ROI of CRM can be difficult without any historical data. To measure CRM ROI you need to take into account of the expenses. Such as the cost of the software, training costs, maintenance costs and system migration costs. Also, the time it takes to get have the CRM up and running. To measure if your performance has improved, you need to look at the time it saves your employees to update the system. You can look at increases in sales, better customer satisfaction, and better performance from marketing campaigns. By comparing your performance metrics and overhead costs from before you implemented the CRM and after, you’ll be able to see if you’re getting a good ROI from your CRM.
You can find a spreadsheet here and a web tool here to help you calculate your CRM ROI. To ensure that you get the best possible ROI from your CRM, everyone from the CEO to each salesperson must have knowledge of what it takes to find and acquire a new customer, the value of that customer, and success in retaining that customer. Being able to track and quantify these has been a difficult task without the benefit of using a CRM System.
The decision to invest or not in a product will lead to one question: will it be worth the ROI? Most CRM software costs money and, like anything you spend money on, you expect a positive ROI. With some business products, it can take years to start seeing that. Fortunately, a CRM offers so many advantages that it starts paying for itself from nearly the moment you implement it. Here are five ways that CRM starts generating ROI almost immediately.
1. Perfect Prospecting
Quite often companies find themselves incorrectly allocating marketing funds on people who don’t want or need your products or services. That’s because a lot of businesses use a one size fits all approach to marketing, meaning they that they will launch a marketing campaign to everyone and anyone, only for them to “waste” money sorting through those that have no general interest in the product or service, when they could of used a more targeted marketing approach to ensure only those that had genuine interest in the product entered the sales funnel. A CRM makes it easy to target your marketing toward your ideal buyer personas. These are the people who want and need your products but aren’t yet aware of your business. By targeting specific groups, you’ll draw in a higher percentage of qualified prospects. That means less time dealing with non-starters, and more ROI for your marketing dollars.
2. Improved Nurturing
Once you’ve identified qualified prospects, you still need to turn them into customers. With CRM, your sales calls and marketing emails can be more easily tailored to specific buyer personas. By gathering a wealth of information about prospects’ interests, you can direct your nurturing efforts with precision. Along the lead nurturing journey, a CRM system will be able to provide you with constant feedback about what is, and what is not, working as well as the potential leads chance of purchasing from you; With that real-time information on hand, you can make any necessary changes promptly, without having to wait for monthly reports to tell you that the campaign has not been a success.
3. Better Customer Service
Finding new customers requires more time and effort than keeping existing customers. And for that reason alone, promoting customer loyalty is one of the best ways to reduce marketing and sales costs. One of the best ways to promote customer loyalty is with great customer service. With an updated CRM you have access to the tools and information to you need to provide a consistent high level of customer service.
With all of your sales team having access to the same data you are able to All of your reducing the chance of errors and eliminating the need for customers to explain any existing issues every time they deal with a new team member. When a customer interacts with your service department, any comments, complaints, and resolutions are logged under the customers contact notes in the CRM. This ensures that, if the customer contacts the company again, they do not need to repeat themselves to another team member. A CRM ensures, your customer service will is faster, and of greater benefit to your customers and team members.
4 .No Wasted Effort
Another way CRM generates ROI is by eliminating duplicated entries. Since everyone who interacts with a customer can see all of the previous interactions with that customer, they won’t waste time making duplicated efforts. Whether it’s marketing, sales, or customer service, everyone will be on the same page. Repeated efforts waste time and resources, reducing the efficiency of your entire business.
5. Inexpensive Infrastructure
Many CRM users are moving toward a cloud-based, software as a service (SaaS) model. This affords your business another opportunity to lower operating costs while increasing sales revenues. On-site hosting of customer data can be prohibitively expensive. Buying servers and software, and setting up and maintaining a data centre, are all costly propositions. The IT costs alone could be enough to derail your profit projections. With the SaaS model, you only pay for the licensing to use the CRM software. There are no servers to maintain, and all of your data will be automatically backed up across multiple data centers. You’ll enjoy lower IT costs and the peace of mind that comes from knowing all of your data can’t be wiped out by a single calamity.