The backbone of today's sales technology is CRM (Customer Relationship Management). This strategy is used by about 45 percent of firms to boost sales productivity and, as a result, revenue. CRM is beneficial to nine out of 10 enterprises.
Implementing a CRM, on the other hand, is a significant investment that necessitates changes in company practises, a steep learning curve, and a long payback period.
According to a G2 survey, it takes 13 months to reach a CRM's Return on Investment.
Calculating the RoI can be challenging because measuring CRM's impact on headline key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, how much does CRM contribute to revenue growth or conversion rates? Is there a way to put a number on it?
We can more effectively quantify headline KPIs, which is why we adopted this way to measure the benefits of CRM in the Forrester study.
Which of the headline KPIs were the most essential to sales executives?
According to 38% of sales leaders, total revenue growth is the most critical criterion in determining a CRM's effectiveness.
You can track the success of your CRM initiatives in several ways. Let's take a look at a couple of methods for evaluating CRM that go beyond the headline KPIs:
A CRM does not begin supplying things as soon as it is installed. The advantages of CRM, however, go beyond the headline figures.
Your CRM investment is in danger if your salespeople only use it when they are forced to. According to the majority of salespeople, CRM cuts into their selling time and is simply a manifestation of repeated work.
Increased adoption rates are one of the most important methods to address this issue; you don't want your salespeople fumbling with their CRM when they should be engaging with prospects and customers.
You'll need a visually appealing, easy-to-navigate user interface. Sellers should be able to quickly pick up the CRM system, get onboarded, and taught, rather than wasting time finding out features that aren't necessary for their job.
Time to sell: The amount of time sales reps save by not having to manually track prospect information, sales discussions, and real progress can be used to gauge a CRM's success.
According to research, sales professionals spend two-thirds of their time on non-revenue producing activities like data entry and emailing.Salespeople are motivated by the desire to sell and interact with clients. They spend a lot of time manually entering data into their systems. This has an effect on productivity, selling time, and motivation. Salespeople are motivated by the desire to sell and interact with clients.
Ease of reporting: Sales reports serve as reality checks to ensure that you're on pace to meet your goals. Reports show you where you're performing better than expected, where your gaps are, and how to close them. You can score the CRM based on how simple it is to generate such reports with a single click.
Answering questions like these can help you assess the simplicity of reporting:
How simple is it for your CRM to respond to the questions above? With only a few clicks, you should be able to acquire these reports and more from a current and cutting-edge CRM. It's tough to pinpoint the correct CRM attribution using the methods described above. For example, how do you measure "reporting ease"? The outcomes of these approaches are largely intangible, but we do know that they increase sales productivity in practice.
Over half (52%) of high-performing salespeople surveyed in a Harvard Business Review research said they are power users who make full use of their company's CRM technology. After deploying CRM, 9 out of 10 respondents stated their firms achieved measurable, meaningful advantages or cost reductions. As a result, 22% of businesses have increased their CRM initiatives.
Here's how CRM helps a variety of sales indicators while also increasing sales productivity.
All sales metrics have a Holy Grail, and this is it. 4 out of 10 businesses saw an 11-20% increase in revenue after deploying CRM.
CRM's advantages don't end there: After deploying a new CRM, another 44% see a 1-10% increase in their topline.
According to research, acquiring a new client is at least five times more expensive than keeping an existing one. A high customer lifetime value shows that you are generating more income from existing customers while reducing turnover.
A CRM, according to 74% of salespeople, has a positive impact on conversion rate. According to the research, conversion rates increased by 11-20% for around 3 out of 10 responders after CRM implementation.
The advantages of CRM have already been explored. A CRM, on the other hand, isn't always a magic wand that you can wave and scream "Abracadabra!" to get your figures. Common issues faced by sales teams (even those using CRM) are frequently not adequately captured by metrics or data.
Different tools are frequently used by sales and marketing to track the client buyer journey (this might also be a CRM!). As a result, there are issues with context and missing data.
The higher regions of the funnel are frequently obscured, resulting in a jumbled image. You'll squander both your time and the buyer's time if you hit discordant notes on your sales call unless you know how purchasers have interacted in the past.
What causes this to happen? Nearly half of the companies polled (47%) presently handle sales operations using several technologies and spreadsheets, resulting in data islands that don't communicate with one another.
In the aftermath of Covid, your team will need to devote more time to investigating, understanding, and responding to the new set of issues that have arisen in the buyers' organisations. However, the average sales representative spends 15% of their time on administrative chores.
Automation of everyday processes is one of the most critical features a CRM should have, according to 31% of respondents. We've gone over a few of the issues you could encounter while utilising a CRM, but here's how you can still reap the benefits of CRM with the appropriate product.
A contemporary CRM can help you improve your lead information by automatically bringing in and updating all available profile information for leads and contacts (email address, LinkedIn profile, designation, and so on). In addition, the perfect CRM would provide you with a 360-degree picture of your prospect data and customer journey.
Another advantage of CRM is that it automatically updates lead logs based on emails exchanged between the salesperson and the lead.
CRM isn't a panacea, but if you choose the proper one for your company and use it correctly, you can add business value and reap the full benefits of CRM – the data proves it.
CRM frequently promises the moon and more, but merely putting it in place will not deliver. The following considerations should be made when dealing with the issues of a CRM:
Keep in mind the disparities in metrics that we saw. While some businesses grow disillusioned with CRM and desire to switch within the next two years, many businesses also find an increase in their headline KPIs after using CRM.
- Blog written by Anushka Trivedi