3 areas you can expect to see the biggest ROI from CRM

According to Nucleus Research, a good CRM can deliver $8.71 for every dollar spent. Whilst this figure may seem a little arbitrary, the need to evaluate the ROI from a CRM is crucial - especially when selecting a new CRM.

Knowing how your CRM is performing is important, this knowledge allows you to make decisions on future CRM deployments and assess how well your investment has been spent.

In this article, we’ll look at three key areas where CRMs deliver big ROIs.  If you can properly assess these areas it’ll make the job of assessing your CRM’s performance a lot easier.

Factor #1: performance visibility

It’s incredibly useful to understand how different team members are performing. This is often lost in a haze of operational activity and many businesses simply look at the output, i.e. the sales figures for a sales rep. A good CRM lets you dive deeper and get answers faster.

These are metrics that can provide a significant ROI by identifying good and bad performers fast, and then modeling best practice by looking at what the best performers actually do. Top performers typically:

• Spend 35% of their time prospecting.
• Go to seven sales meetings per month.
• Add 13 new prospects to the CRM every week.
• Use CRM to improve cold calling.

By working out what the best salespeople do and distilling this for other team members the entire sales team can enjoy and uplift – a huge ROI.

Factors #2: cost reduction

It should be relatively easy to assess whether a CRM is delivering cost savings in a business area. For example, in customer service a good CRM can enable agents to quickly uncover and solve customer problems.

Check out our free CRM cost and budget guide to determine how much you can spend and save when selecting CRM

Two important CRM metrics used are:

1. Expenditure
2. Customer Satisfaction

The ROI on lowering headcount and improving customer satisfaction can be huge.

Factor #3: lead nurturing

It’s a hard CRM metric to quantify but lead nurturing is a fundamentally important ROI from CRM. Lead nurturing is defined nicely by Marketo as:

“The process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel, and through every step of the buyer's journey. It focuses on marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects, and providing the information and answers they need.”

Ensuring that every stage of the sales pipeline is performing effectively will be different for every business but three key stages that ROI can measure are:

• New leads = how many new leads are entering the pipeline.
• Qualified Leads = what is the weighted value of leads in the pipeline.
• Closed Sales = how many leads are closed and the value of these leads.

Once these figures are regularly tracked they can clearly demonstrate how well a team is performing over time. The ROI for a better lead nurturing process can be transformative for a business.

You must persist

A CRM can deliver ROI in many ways. Some are easy to quantify and others are much harder but you must persist in trying to track this return; only then can you make well informed decisions on CRM specification and deployment decisions.