CRM ROI: What’s the Value of Your Customer Relationship Management Applications?
CRMs play a crucial role in organizations – they manage and organize all of your interactions with customers and leads. However, just because software is valuable for other firms doesn’t mean that you’re actually getting ROI on it.
Additionally, calculating CRM ROI isn’t quite as simple as plugging figures into a formula – there are other considerations you must keep in mind to get the full picture of your CRM’s business value.
Read on to learn how to calculate CRM ROI with a real-life example of one of the world’s most popular CRMs.
Calculating CRM ROI
Calculating CRM ROI involves what would seem to be a simple formula:
(Gain from investment – cost of investment) ÷ cost of investment = ROI
Yet, how do you measure gain? Most businesses only look at revenue or profits. However, that doesn’t give you the full picture of what you’re getting out of your ROI.
Experts suggest looking at the following categories of CRM ROI:
- Business metrics (including profit gains, cost savings, and reaching your break-even point on your investment)
- Sales metrics (including sales revenue increases, the number of products per customer, and how much more efficient your sales cycle is as a result)
- Marketing metrics (including the number of leads generated, the cost per lead, and the revenue generated by a campaign)
- Service metrics (including customer satisfaction, first contact resolution rate, and the average time to resolve)
In the following sections, we’ll explore how to best measure CRM ROI by looking at Salesforce, the most popular CRM on the market.
Salesforce from the IT Perspective
Salesforce is a feature-rich CRM. As a result, the pricing model is fairly complex. There’s a wide variety of Salesforce CRM solutions, each of which has its own pricing structure and licensing tiers. As a result, trying to figure out who in your organization needs which licensing tier becomes a messy proposition.
IT departments tend to focus on what applications, services, and platforms they’re paying for, and how much they’re paying for them. Yet, there’s another part to measuring CRM ROI, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
The “Soft” Value of Salesforce
When business decision-makers talk about Salesforce CRM ROI, they tend to focus on “hard” values – the values they can quantify. They might ignore the “soft” values – benefits that can’t be measured so easily, yet they’re still important to a firm and its growth.
Here are examples of soft values that Salesforce can deliver:
- Greater visibility into your customer information
- It’s easier to manage customer information
- You can rely on the information within a CRM because it’s a single source of truth
As a result of these benefits, employees will be more efficient at doing their jobs – they’ll be able to work faster because they all have access to the same, reliable information. You may also see a boost in employee morale because their jobs will be easier and less frustrating thanks to Salesforce.
Yet, the “soft” CRM ROI is also difficult to measure without hard evidence. That’s where Productiv comes in. Productiv offers comprehensive analytics to give you deeper insight into your CRM ROI. In the following sections, we’ll show how Productiv helps you measure your CRM ROI in three ways:
- Continuously
- Precisely
- Dynamically
Measuring Salesforce CRM ROI Continuously
Because most Salesforce customers are on annual contracts, measuring Salesforce CRM ROI typically takes place once a year. However, CRM ROI doesn’t have to be measured only once a year. You can actually measure it in real-time, with the right CRM ROI measurement solution.
Productiv identifies gaps in the adoption of specific features or within specific teams. So, let’s say that the marketing department isn’t using one of Salesforce’s latest features (but you’re paying for it). Productiv can tell you that now, so you don’t need to wait until the annual Salesforce CRM ROI review.
Measuring Salesforce CRM ROI Precisely
As we mentioned earlier, Salesforce licensing is complicated. Like many other firms, you probably have multiple licenses and tiers, which makes it hard to figure out whether the right people have access to the type of license they need. You wind up guessing which employees need access to specific features.
With Productiv, you can assess CRM activity down to the feature and action so that you have optimal Salesforce CRM ROI. That information allows you to not only make better decisions about provisioning licenses, it enables you to make smarter renewal decisions. When it’s clear that the people who are supposed to be benefiting from a premium feature aren’t using it, you can safely decline to purchase it again.
Measuring Salesforce CRM Dynamically
Take a moment and think about all of the angles you’d like to look at Salesforce CRM ROI:
- By team
- By office
- By location
- By cost center
How easy is it to find this data? Do you have to waste time and effort hunting down information from disparate sources, joining the data together and cleaning all of it up, then creating endless pivot tables? Even after you do all of that, the information is still incomplete, and now it’s out of date because it’s not being drawn out directly out of a system of record.
Productiv makes it easy to compare engagement by team. You can even drill down to feature and user actions. With Productiv, you can look at usage patterns over the course of one day, a week, a month, two months, or three months, so you can tell which teams are increasing or decreasing their adoption.
Productiv: Offering Deeper Insights into CRM ROI
Your CRM solution is a vital part of your SaaS ROI, and calculating it shouldn’t be a time-consuming, complicated task.
With Productiv, you can understand who’s using your CRM, how they’re using it, and whether they’re getting the most value out of it by utilizing premium features. Productiv allows you to make better decisions based on data. Click here to learn more.