Realizing value from CRM beyond its total expenses is crucial. Otherwise, why bother investing in CRM?
Creating additional business value from CRM software in ways other than ‘closing more deals’ means understanding its full scope of potential capabilities.
It involves identifying areas within the organization where CRM can yield positive results, ultimately leading to increased customer loyalty and retention.
It’s an exercise that requires domain experience, in-depth internal conversations, and creativity.
Here are some areas where we, as independent consultants, have facilitated, in which CRM can add value and create impact beyond the common reasons for making a CRM investment.
Corporate Memory Preservation
Corporate memory (a.k.a. institutional memory) is the combined knowledge, experience, and insights vital to business success.
Businesses face risk when key employees leave or roles shift, potentially losing critical customer relationship information and operational insights.
Implementing CRM software helps protect and centralize this corporate memory, capturing customer interactions, deal histories, and internal knowledge.
This approach ensures continuity, facilitates informed decision-making, and enhances customer experiences by providing teams with a consistent, shared understanding of company relationships and practices.
Sales Collaboration Tools to Boost Team Efficiency
Collaborative selling is essential for companies that offer technical, customized, or complex solutions. This approach involves coordinated efforts from sales, engineering, design, and manufacturing teams to develop tailored solutions that meet customer needs.
However, disparate systems can lead to miscommunication and delays. Implementing a CRM system centralizes information, streamlines task assignments, and enhances accountability.
With CRM, teams gain real-time visibility into deal statuses, facilitate seamless pricing and negotiation discussions, and leverage internal networks to unlock new opportunities.
This integrated approach accelerates sales cycles, fosters stronger customer trust, and drives revenue growth.
More Efficient Post-sales Handoffs Through Streamlined Processes
Activating sales order functionality in a CRM system enhances post-sales processes by serving as an intermediary between opportunities and invoices. This integration facilitates smoother handoffs from sales to operations and finance teams, creating a more seamless customer experience.
Sales orders provide the customer and revenue operations teams with the detailed information necessary for effective customer interactions and allow for the addition of products or services without requiring salesperson involvement.
They also streamline the transition to invoicing by acting as a bridge to invoicing, thereby improving internal efficiency.
Tracking lead sources through to orders enables a more accurate calculation of marketing activity ROI by attributing long-term revenue to specific sources.
Resolve Customer Questions and Issues More Quickly
Implementing a CRM system’s native ticketing, also known as case management functionality, is often an afterthought.
Customer service and technical support functionality often remain locked in a separate point solution after a new sales and marketing system goes live.
However, most CRM platforms can now be configured to serve and support customers through multiple communication channels.
Knowledge bases are being replaced by AI agents that can answer very specific questions with accurate, internally sourced information.
Equipment manufacturers can leverage field service management within CRM.
Service needs like these should be part of an up-front requirements-gathering exercise.
Increase Customers’ Share of Wallet With Actionable Insights
A well-implemented CRM system empowers sales leaders to strategically grow customer wallet share, especially within major accounts that currently divide spending between their company and competitors.
By leveraging CRM insights, teams can identify whitespace, uncover untapped opportunities, and proactively expand relationships across multiple divisions or programs within key accounts.
CRM can facilitate regular Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), ensuring continuous engagement and accurately tracking evolving customer needs.
Additionally, account mapping capabilities enable sales teams to navigate complex organizational structures, identify influential decision-makers, and capitalize on emerging opportunities quickly.
This ultimately increases customer share of wallet and fortifies a company’s position as a trusted partner with top-tier clients.
Better Access to Sales Enablement Technology and Resources
CRM systems can significantly boost B2B sales enablement by providing sales teams with quick access to relevant content and resources exactly when needed.
Sellers often struggle to locate essential sales tools, such as brochures, videos, email templates, and slide decks, which prolong sales cycles and reduce win rates.
A well-designed CRM system can centralize these resources, categorize them by selling motion, and streamline content delivery. Additionally, CRM can let users automatically enter prospects into targeted nurture sequences, further accelerating deal progression.
Leveraging a CRM for sales enablement ensures sales leaders can empower their teams, shorten sales cycles, and maximize the return on their CRM investment.
Create Company-Wide Value With an XRM Strategy
Even small businesses sometimes invest in an enterprise-grade CRM system to extend the platform to improve business processes outside sales, marketing, and customer service.
XRM (Extended Relationship Management) typically involves customizing the CRM database and front-end to address specific business needs that currently involve manual processes or disjointed systems.
An interesting illustrative example of custom XRM is a local seeing-eye dog organization. It has a custom canine table and table interrelationships within its CRM system.
Various data points and activities for dogs can be tracked, from birth to puppy raising, training, person assignment, and retirement. You won’t find this capability in a CRM vendor’s marketing literature.
A more mainstream example is a real estate company that tracks properties or buildings as entities in its CRM system. Another example is a medical device company that stores field assets in a custom table.
XRM can also mean purchasing a pre-developed package from a CRM vendor’s third-party marketplace. Larger CRM vendors have extensive ecosystems of partners that develop packages that can be easily integrated into their platforms.
Additional business value creation with CRM often means thinking outside the box and asking the right questions.
Ideally, this occurs before an extensive cash outlay for the supporting technology, so the wheels don’t have to be changed on a moving bus.
