After Implementing a New CRM System, 89 per cent of Businesses See an Increase in Revenue

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?

• Many firms cannot state with certainty that CRM makes a difference for them due to the tricky nature of these impact metrics.
• Do CRM solutions deliver on their promises and expectations? Do the advantages of CRM truly add up?
• Let's discuss the following topics in this blog:
• For the Forrester survey, we spoke with the following people:
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Implementation Expectations
• CRM's impact/benefits
• Why doesn't a CRM always work?

Requirements for a new CRM implementation

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.

• More market penetration is crucial in determining the benefits of CRM, according to 31% of respondents.
• One-third of respondents desired CRM to increase client lifetime value.
• One out of every four executives wanted CRM to boost their conversion rates.

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:

Sales teams' adoption

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.

As sales leaders, we must ask ourselves, "Is my CRM adding value?"

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:

• Is it necessary to hire an expert or someone with technical experience to pull reports?
• Is it simple and straightforward to customise reports with the CRM tool?
• Does it assist you in accurately forecasting the pipeline by highlighting the deals that are most likely to close?

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.

CRM's Advantages

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.

Total income

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.

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Here are three reasons why a CRM could have an immediate impact on sales growth:

• Increased sales output: A modern cloud CRM platform will often automate routine chores and workflows, freeing up salespeople's time to focus on "core selling" activities such as emails, calls, and demos. You'll be able to automatically send out reminder emails, arrange calls, and schedule demos.
• Identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities: Once leads have been converted, a CRM will allow you to run campaigns to upsell and cross-sell items and services via relevant communications in order to optimise income.
• Re-engage cold leads: CRM allows you to create campaigns to re-engage leads who have become dormant. By tailoring your messaging based on their previous activity or interests, you can gradually encourage them toward conversion.

Customer Value Over Time

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.

What role does a CRM play in increasing Customer Lifetime Value?

• Onboarding and training for customers: Create customised training programmes for your customers. A CRM will allow you to plan out a training programme, assist buyers in understanding your product, and get them started utilising it to reach their objectives.
• Engagement with the client: You'll be able to send out emails about product updates and new features, as well as tips and hacks and instructional videos, all from your CRM. Regularly engaging with your clientele ensures that they connect with, relate to, and stick with your brand.
• Targeted promotions: You can locate the clients who respond positively to discounts and other promotional offers by segmenting your customers with a CRM. As a result, you'll be able to keep more people in that category and enhance their lifetime value.

Rate of Conversion

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.

Here's how a CRM could affect your company's conversion rates:

• Lead Scoring: By assigning scores to leads, sales staff will be able to focus their efforts on pursuing and converting the best sales leads for your company. AI helps you score leads based on their characteristics and behaviour in CRM suites like OneHash CRM. You'll be able to increase sales conversion rates by 50% as a result of this.
• Callback Reminders: You want to keep things going and capitalise on the momentum when prospects first contact you. A CRM will assist you in tracking callbacks to various leads, which will help you keep things going. According to research, it takes at least five follow-up attempts after the initial sales contact for a consumer to say yes, but 44 percent of sales professionals give up after one "no." A CRM will assist you in tracking callbacks to various leads, which will help you keep things going.
• Standardise Processes: A CRM will allow you to construct a list of tasks and map them to each stage of the buyer journey, such as sending out successful case studies at the top of the funnel and discussing Proof of Concepts (PoCs) at the bottom.

Why doesn't a CRM always work?

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.

The absence of context

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.

Time spent on non-profitable activities

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.

Bringing everything together

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:

• Define your CRM investment's core drivers and business objectives. Not only from an internal perspective – a CRM isn't only about making life easier for your employees — but also from the perspective of the benefits it provides to your customers.
• Collaborate on and construct a comprehensive business use case that includes stakeholders from various departments. Keep the end-users and their needs in mind as well.
• Establish the appropriate metrics that can be monitored back to your CRM. This will ensure that the Return on Investment question is answered and that your team is working toward the correct metrics.

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.

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- Blog written by Anushka Trivedi