30 ways CRM should be helping your business

With the current economic turmoil now is a good time to look at the ways that your CRM system can and should be impacting your business. Below is a check list for each group of users primarily affected by the system. We recommend that you take a couple of minutes to establish whether your organisation is reaping all of the rewards of the investment you have already made by considering how your system has added value under each heading.

For Sales and Business Development staff:

1) Maximise cross- and up-sell opportunities
2) Improve team collaboration on opportunities
3) Improve prospect targeting
4) Increases revenue yield per opportunity and account
5) Provide real-time visibility on sales KPIs
6) Improve win rates
7) Shorten sales cycles
8) Reduce sales training costs
9) Eliminate duplicated sales processes
10) Decrease time spent on administrative tasks
11) Reduce sales forecast variance
12) Eliminate inconsistent sales practices

For Marketing operations:

1) Enable marketing programmes to be planned more efficiently and effectively
2) Improve campaign response rates
3) Enable accurate measurement of marketing campaign ROI
4) Ensure customers and prospects receive the right marketing message at the right time
5) Reduce marketing administrative overhead and enables marketing budget to be tracked and managed
6) Decrease the cost per customer acquired
7) Reduce marketing campaign lead times
8) Reduce cost per lead

For Customer Service operations:
 
1) Provide web self service
2) Increase productivity of agents
3) Ensure issues never “get lost between the cracks”
4) Enable agents to capture further sales leads from customer interactions
5) Improve response times to customer service requests
6) Increase customer retention
7) Reduce customer support costs
8) Reduce the average time to resolve an issue
9) Decrease the number of customer cases that are re-opened
10) Decrease the  number of customer service escalations

And for senior executives:

1) Drive revenue growth
2) Improve profitability
3) Provide improved support for strategic decision-making
4) Enable real-time corporate performance management
5) Drive productivity across the entire organisation
6) Improve business/shareholder value
7) Reduce margin erosion
8) Reduce cost-of-sale
9) Reduce customer attrition
10) Reduce administration cost
11) Eliminate process bottlenecks
12) Reduce budget variance
13) Reduce performance variance

Are you getting all these benefits fully?

If not prioritise those with the biggest potential return and talk to your Account Manager for advice on how to get that benefit.

You may have counted a lot more than 30 points – this is because we strongly believe that you have to deliver more to your clients than you promise particularly in a downturn.