DESCRIPTION
The return on investment for investing in sales CRM software depends somewhat on what your needs are and what they become over time. As your business grows and develops so your CRM needs will change. That is why it is so important to have a well-planned CRM strategy so that you can get a software that saves you money and suits your business now, but will also scale up and suit you in a couple of years, and then in 5 years even. A strategy is important. Do you need to integrate the software into accounting too? The more you adapt and use the CRM software the more ROI you will see and you can quickly recoup that initial investment and costs in deployment, training and consulting fees.
Tangible ROI factors
You can classify ROI into either tangible factors and intangible, and of course, the tangible ones are a lot easier to express or quantify. Your sales team will identify and close more sales, more quickly. That is something you can measure, you might even find closures are happening as much as 20% faster. The increase in productivity this brings is easy to measure in the increase in the revenue it brings. Specific marketing campaigns can be better targeted and planned using the data you have and that means they are more likely to see success. Your ROI based on the sales from that marketing campaign can also be measured.
Intangible factors
With the implementation of CRM software, there are other benefits that are harder to measure or quantify but are still there and still important. You can automate the marketing and sales process so a lot of repeatable tasks staff were having to spend some time on, are now taken care of. Now that they do not have their spreadsheets and such to maintain they can work more on finding new customers. You will be surprised by how much productivity was taken up with admin tasks.
Other factors include being able to better set goals and targets and meeting them. Fewer customer complaints having to be handled because of the up to date and essential data the sales team now have access to. An increase in customer satisfaction means a boost in revenue and profit and a boost in branding as they recommend you to others. Using sales CRM software you can boost efficiency across many different processes and have a big impact on your bottom line.
Conclusion
When considering whether to invest in CRM software you need to think about your requirements so you can choose whether a web-based CRM solution or an in-house solution is the best system for your business. From there you can better think about the kind of services and features you need and the budget you have. Have your goals and plans in place, so you can ensure you get the best ROI. That means understanding your current processes in customer service, sales and marketing so you can see where the benchmarks are after you implement the software.
