At some point, the decision on whether or not to invest in a product for your business comes down to one simple question: will it be worth the return on investment?
Most CRM software costs money and, like anything you spend money on, you expect a positive ROI. With some business products, it can take years to start seeing that.
Fortunately, CRM offers so many advantages that it starts paying for itself from nearly the moment you implement it. Listed here are five ways that CRM starts generating ROI almost immediately.
1. Perfect Prospecting
A lot of marketing dollars are wasted on people who don’t want or need your products. That’s because a lot of businesses use a “big net” approach to marketing. They cast their marketing campaign nets far and wide, then sift through the catch to find qualified prospects. A lot of time, money, and effort goes into separating the seaweed from the shrimp.
CRM makes it easy to target your marketing toward your ideal buyer personas. These are the people who want and need your products, but aren’t yet aware of your business. By targeting specific groups, you’ll draw in a higher percentage of qualified prospects. That means less time dealing with non-starters, and more ROI for your marketing dollars.
2. Improved Nurturing
Once you’ve identified qualified prospects, you still need to turn them into customers. With CRM, your sales calls and marketing emails can be more easily tailored to specific buyer personas. By gathering a wealth of information about prospects’ interests, you can direct your nurturing efforts with surgical precision.
Along the way, a CRM system will be providing you with constant feedback about what is, and what is not, working. With that real-time information on hand, you can make any necessary changes on the fly, without having to wait for monthly or quarterly reports to tell you that you’ve missed the target.
3. Better Customer Service
One of the best ways to promote customer loyalty is with great customer service. CRM gives you all of the tools and information to provide a consistently high level of customer service.
Finding new customers requires more time and effort than keeping existing customers. For that reason, promoting customer loyalty is one of the best ways to reduce marketing and sales costs, and one of the best ways to promote customer loyalty is with great customer service. CRM gives you all of the tools and information to provide a consistently high level of customer service.
All of your customer-facing agents will be working from the same pool of data, reducing the chance of embarrassing errors, and eliminating the need for customers to explain any existing issues every time they deal with a new agent. When a customer interacts with your service department, any comments, complaints, and resolutions are logged. That way, if the customer contacts the service department again, the next agent won’t have to start over from scratch. With CRM, your customer service will be faster, and of greater benefit to your customers.
4. No Wasted Effort
Another way CRM generates ROI is by eliminating duplicated efforts. Since everyone who interacts with a customer can see all of the previous interactions with that customer, they won’t waste time repeating past actions.
Whether it’s marketing, sales, or service, everyone will be on the same page. Repeated efforts waste time and resources, reducing the efficiency of your entire business. With CRM, you can establish a continuum of actions for all of your customer-facing departments, and be sure that every action advances along that continuum.
5. Inexpensive Infrastructure
Many CRM vendors are moving toward a cloud-based, software as a service (SaaS) model. This affords your business another opportunity to lower operating costs while increasing sales revenues. On-site hosting of customer data can be prohibitively expensive. Buying servers and software, and setting up and maintaining a data center, are all costly propositions. The IT costs alone could be enough to derail your profit projections.
With the SaaS model, you only pay for the licensing to use the CRM software. There are no servers to maintain, and all of your data will be automatically backed up across multiple data centers. You’ll enjoy lower IT costs and the peace of mind that comes from knowing all of your data can’t be wiped out by a single calamity.
A Safe Bet
CRM is a growing industry because it provides ROI to the businesses that use it. They enjoy increased sales, decreased sales and marketing costs, and improved operational efficiency. There is no “silver bullet” software that can solve all of your problems and guarantee success. However, there are tools that you can use to better steer your decisions and improve the effectiveness of your efforts. CRM is one of those tools, and you can start enjoying the ROI as soon as the software is up and running.
