Customer relationship management (CRM) remains a huge investment for any organisation. Critical to its success is a clear understanding of the value drivers for implementing CRM within any organisation. Intuition suggests that increased management of customer relationships should improve business performance, but this intuition has only inconsistent empirical or real world support.
Value drivers provide competitive advantages for a business. They can come in many forms, such as: cutting-edge technology, brand recognition, or satisfied customers. Value drivers for implementing CRM should likewise be multi-faceted. They should include the processes, organisational strategies and technologies that help maximize investments in CRM for small businesses.
For top performing companies, many of the value drivers have to do with how CRM is used rather than a single feature. When it comes to CRM, there are three main value drivers for implementing CRM. These are:
1. The software’s ability to help manage marketing and sales campaigns. CRM can help businesses test marketing and distribution strategies and gauge customer reactions. This information can be applied to future marketing efforts.
2. The software serves as a customer data repository. This then allows you to consolidate customer knowledge within the organization in CRM. This includes far more than just contact details, but also customer behaviors and attitudes and price sensitivity. This, combined with personal data, can allow businesses to build more effective and predictive sales models and marketing campaigns that result in higher sales.
3. Help demonstrate ROI. With CRM you can quantitatively show increases in sales, customer referrals and participation in promotions.
CRM is only valuable if the accuracy and quality of data in the system can be used for data-driven decisions. Data-driven intelligence provides a vital tool for informed decision making. The cost of bad data to your organisation can be substantial.
Recent research increasingly rank integration and consolidation as top ways to extract value from CRM investments.
The top value drivers for implementing CRM
Here is a closer look at the top value drivers for implementing CRM.
- Managing marketing/sales campaign through CRM (89%)
- Consolidate all customer knowledge in the organisation into the CRM solution (80%)
- Demonstrate Return on Investment through increased sales revenue (74%)
- Leverage data collected from company initiatives for improves decision making (55%)
- Data quality and cleansing (50%)
- Augment CRM with sales intelligence data (41%)
- Mobile access to CRM (25%)
- Establish a company wide data collection standard (21%)
- Implement employee training (16%)
Consistently the key value driver for implementing CRM is enabling marketing and sales to win more business. Once this has been achieved it is easy to demonstrate a clear return on investment. A customer of ProAptivity realised an addition £100,000 in sales supported by a reduction in admin costs to the value of £70,000 within 12 months of implementation
How ProAptivity can help with Value Drivers for implementing CRM
A CRM system benefits an organisation through the visibility of its sales activities. This visibility is fundamental to managing sales performance and control of the sales process. This visibility enables management to understand why, when, who and how opportunities are being won, stalled, or being lost. If it cannot be monitored, it cannot be managed. The visibility offered within the CRM system also allows management to make educated business decisions based on hard data. A CRM system will enable structured data to be used to access performance. This assessment should indicate which sales person is out performing others.
ProAptivity are an independent CRM solutions provider. We focus on the implementation, training, and support of highly customised CRM software solutions. Our CRM software supported by our sales training provide customers with the tools needed to deliver successful sales process management.
Fundamentally, we help organisations embed CRM best practice throughout their organisation. This helps organisations become more competitive, customer focused and ultimately more profitable.
If you need help in understanding why my business needs CRM, maybe some of our eBooks could help! Alternatively visit Maximizer CRM for more information. Contact us today in Belfast on 028 9099 6388 or at our Bedford office on 01234 214004. Alternatively email us on info@proaptivity.com. Contact us today for a free CRM consultation that will assess if your business is CRM ready.
