CRM software is a suite of applications that stores customer data. It serves as a platform for sales, and the latest marketing and service teams, to manage customer interactions to improve the user experience (UX).
If used to its full potential, CRM allows representatives to spend more time with customers as well as potential customers, which inevitably leads to better UX. What’s more, using CRM has led to a massive decrease in churn, which is always great.
Despite the obvious benefits, the question remains for those who are yet to adopt a CRM: is the cost worth it? How much value does it add to my business?
In the following paragraphs, we will attempt to answer those questions precisely.
Is the cost worth it?
Yes, by estimates the return on investment for CRM in 2022 will be nearly $9 for every $1 spent (Nucleus Research). That is astonishing, but let’s look at how different teams take advantage of CRMs in their daily operations.
Sales
CRM began as a tool for salespeople to efficiently keep their clients in one place, but has grown into much more.
- Lead scoring allows the sales team to prioritize leads and create an optimized plan for which sales to pursue first.
- Sales reporting and improved sales forecasting features make CRMs an essential tool, as a ton of time is saved by not having to make sales reports manually.
- Automated sales processes mean the CRM does the heavy lifting of proceeding leads down the sales funnel and distributing them among different reps based on predefined criteria and triggering events. Once you see how much easier sales become, there’s no going back.
Marketing
The foremost benefit of CRM is that it helps align your sales and marketing activities because it acts as a shared platform. But there are plenty of other benefits as well.
- Data-driven analysis makes it easier to determine which marketing campaigns were most successful and which fell short.
- The ability to segment audiences using custom filters allows salespeople to communicate better with leads and convert them into customers by targeting them with personalized content.
- CRMs can run mass email campaigns, track their performance and help the marketing team understand how it impacts overall sales.
Service
Popular CRM solutions also offer customer support and service capabilities, so users can keep track of customer complaints and/or requests and process them more efficiently.
- By allowing tracking of customer service requests, CRMs reduce churn because no customer feels ignored. Service reps can track individual tickets or even pull out the entire history of a particular customer during an interaction to figure out how to best serve them.
- Because CRMs can create alerts and notifications for each customer requests coming in, employees can address each issue as it comes in, and thus the waiting time is decreased.
How much value does it add to my business?
If the advantages stated above have piqued your interest, but you’re still not sure how much value it will add, let’s look at how we can determine the value of a CRM solution according to your needs. There are a few different things to consider:
- What are your goals for your business?
- Do you use different services that you may need to integrate with your CRM such as accounting?
- Can your current workflows be more efficient?
- Can your employees get on board with ease?
Let’s address each of these in order.
Your goals determine the necessity for a CRM. If you want your business to grow quickly, and
you think that more efficient processes can get you to your growth target, CRM is necessary.
If you use different services such as accounting and email marketing, then to get the most value,
you should look at a CRM that can handle such integrations and others that you may need in the
future.
If your current workflows appear to be the biggest bottleneck in the growth of your business,
then CRM can be an invaluable asset, as at its core, it serves to improve processes and
workflows for different teams, as discussed above.
Last but not the least, what matters is how well can your company deal with a new platform.
Getting people on board with new technology can be tricky and time-consuming, but long term,
CRM offers enough to justify the change. If your business can withstand the transitional period,
you should seriously consider adopting CRM full-time.
Conclusion
CRM is the fastest-growing software market in the world, and for good reason. It has helped
improve business processes worldwide for companies of all sizes. What value a particular CRM
the solution delivers to you depends on what your needs are, and whether the growth targets you
have for your business can be accelerated using the different features it offers.
