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Calculating the ROI of CRM

Before you even think about calculating the ROI of CRM you need to ensure you understand the desired business outcomes and the improvements you would like to make to your business then work out what needs to change in order to achieve those outcomes.

Once you have the basic justification for your investment in place, you will be in a much stronger position to calculate your ROI – and ultimately reduce the risk of failure to deliver.

Forrester analysts have written a report, Quantify the Value of CRM, which includes some advice you may find useful. Before you start, you may also want to read recommendations from analyst William Band addressing specific issues when it comes to calculating ROI – all of which will ultimately help you cut costs and boost sales.

But for now, let’s review the key elements you need to consider when calculating the ROI of CRM.

asset-38.png1. Revenue Ambitions

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What objectives have you defined in relation to the expectation that your CRM investment will help you to achieve higher revenues? The more specific you can be, in terms of capturing customer spending on different products, working out the potential to increase higher-margin product sales, cutting out obstacles that threaten the continuity of customer relationships or assessing the impact of applying discounts to different customer groups, the more accurate your forecast is likely to be.

Set your target. Imagine that your CRM project will generate five additional sales per month – or 60 per year. If your average sale is worth £1,000, CRM could bring in an extra £60,000. How?

  • Improved sales managementMakes salespeople more effective and productive, because they have access to better information and can react instantly to client requirements.
  • New lead conversion rates improveAs salespeople know more about their customers and make increasingly targeted sales.
  • Existing customers become more valuableAs salespeople are able to target them with more informed and relevant offers.

asset-17.png2. Cutting Costs

Where will you be able to reduce your exposure to expenditure, and how much will you be able to save? Unprofitable customers, unproductive employee time, online self-service possibilities and marketing campaigns that wastefully target non-responsive customers would be typical targets here.

asset-5.png3. Time Saving Benefits

Your sales team is best employed in the field, selling and talking to customers – gathering more information and generating revenue. So why are they spending their time manually capturing leads from your website? If six people are spending 10 minutes each just on this task, that’s a whole hour of potential selling time that could be saved using the automatic lead capture functionality of CRM.

icon-4.png4. Steamlined IT

Can you pinpoint specific efficiency goals? Reduced maintenance and licence management costs, more effective support for users and simpler development paths should all feature in your ROI calculations.

asset-18.png5. The Real Cost Of Your Investment

Choosing the right supplier can be a minefield, with forced upgrades, the unexpected expense of additional features, varying licence costs, mysterious discount plans and the need to modernise the business’s IT infrastructure, proving common stumbling blocks for the unwary. Be sure of your outlay before you make your calculations.

asset-15.png6. The Price of Disruption

What will the real cost be in terms of training, project team commitments, possible delays in implementation and impacts on productivity while CRM beds down in the business? You’ll need to make some firm estimates and factor contingency plans into your calculations.

asset-50.png7. Ongoing Overheads

Implementing CRM is just the start. What are the long-term cost implications for maintenance and management? Even cloud-based CRM requires an internal commitment to ensuring that the data is up-to- date, and that the system is meeting the business’s needs.

asset-35.png8. The Ripple Effect

Integrating CRM with existing infrastructure and business systems will always have unexpected consequences. Have you accounted for the impact on the efficiency and productivity of departments beyond the immediate focus of the implementation?

The potential rewards of CRM are great. CRM will transform the way your business operates, it will help you win more customers, and keep the ones you have, boosting revenue. It will reduce if not remove inefficiencies across the organisation. It will increase profits and improve the working lives of your employees…

All it takes now is for you to begin building the business case and calculating the ROI.

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Can I mix and match licences

The CRM Success for Accounting programme is designed to help Accountancy firms take their first step into Client Relationship Management (CRM).

Based on years of experience helping professional services firms with CRM deployments, the programme delivers a best practice approach to implementing CRM for marketing and business development teams in less than one month.

CRM Success for accounting

The CRM Success for Accounting programme is designed to help Accountancy firms take their first step into Client Relationship Management (CRM).

Based on years of experience helping professional services firms with CRM deployments, the programme delivers a best practice approach to implementing CRM for marketing and business development teams in less than one month.

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Improve new business development

In order to be successful at developing your practice, you need to attract and develop new clients. You need easy access to real-time information, deep customer insights and the tools to close and onboard a new client, quickly and efficiently.

Workbooks CRM provides a 360-degree view of your prospects and clients. You can track and analyse all of the interactions and transactions you have had and the outcomes of those.

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Sell more to existing clients

How can you leverage the wealth of financial and historical data you have for your existing clients in order to identify and drive cross-sell opportunities? How do you get the right visibility and insights?

Workbooks CRM offers an outstanding cross-selling platform, providing great visibility of what services have been sold to existing clients.

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Get started for as little as £25 a month!

Whatever your business needs, we have a solution for you.

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Business Edition £55

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You can mix and match editions of Workbooks so you only pay for what you need.

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Get started for as little as £25 a month!

Whatever your business needs, we have a solution for you.

Standard Edition £25

per user per month billed annually

  • Sales Management
  • Marketing Management
  • Customer Service Management
  • Order Management
Compare full features
Business Edition £55

per user per month billed annually

  • Sales Management
  • Marketing Management
  • Customer Service Management
  • Order Management
Compare full features
Did you know?

You can mix and match editions of Workbooks so you only pay for what you need.

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4.4 out of 5 (106 reviews)

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A PARTNER, NOT A PURCHASE

CRM is a journey, and we’re with you every step of the way.

Our Shared Success approach reduces the risk of your CRM project failing and reduces the cost of implementation in three ways:

  • We help you understand what you need from CRM software to achieve your business goals with a co-funded workshop before you invest in software
  • When you invest in Workbooks, we co-fund your implementation to give you a made-to-measure CRM for an off-the-shelf price
  • And with a co-funded customer success programme, you can future-proof your business processes with a CRM that grows with you

That’s why, on average, our customers stay with us for 10 years and more than 1000 businesses around the world already trust Workbooks to help them work better, work together, and work in the right way.

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Over 1400 customers trust workbooks to run their business.

Why not join them? Try the best cloud CRM software for your business, free for 30 days.No commitment, no credit card required. Questions? Talk to our friendly team on +44 0118 3030 100

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  • We’ll help you crystallise what success looks like for your business and define the outcomes that are most important to you.
  • You‘ll be able to leverage our technical architects and engineers to build specific automations or integrations to external systems that fit perfectly around your business processes and help streamline operations.
  • You’ll be able to tap into our in-depth knowledge, experience and best practices.
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You‘ll be able to leverage our technical architects and engineers to build specific automations or integrations to external systems that fit perfectly around your business processes and help streamline operations.

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Evolve or be left behind

The accounting sector is undergoing dramatic changes. Downwards price pressures and commoditisation of compliance services, digital transformation, increased competition and clients’ changing expectations are shaking up the profession.

Forward thinking practices have realised that they must evolve and innovate if they are to survive and flourish in this new commercial landscape. They are implementing new business development models as traditional methods of network expansion are becoming harder to employ.

They efficiently attract new clients but also maximise the opportunities that exist within their client base They diversify their services and leverage technologies in order to achieve greater efficiency and drive a sustainable competitive advantage.

CRM can be the catalyst for change, underpinning the development and promotion of a sales culture across the firm and enabling best practices in generating new business and cross-sell revenue.

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CRM can be the catalyst for change, underpinning the development and promotion of a sales culture across the firm and enabling best practices in generating new business and cross-sell revenue.

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CRM can be the catalyst for change, underpinning the development and promotion of a sales culture across the firm and enabling best practices in generating new business and cross-sell revenue.

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Our Professional Services team can guide you through the process of setup and implementation, integrations with other business applications etc. to ensure you realise the full potential of your investment in CRM.

During implementation, our seasoned consultants will work with your project team to create deployment plans aimed at accelerating Time to Value.

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Feature Title
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Licence Cost
Entry level pricing for CRM edition, which includes sales and customer support, starts at £22 per user per month. Order processing & invoicing is included in our Business edition at £50 per user per month.
Salesforce’s entry level pricing starts at £60 per user per month, nearly 3x the price of Workbooks CRM edition, despite offering similar functionality. This rises to £120 for the Enterprise Licences, which includes functionality that is standard in both Workbooks CRM and Business editions. And if you want to do invoicing in Salesforce, you need to buy third party plug-ins or build it yourself.
Sales & Service Functionality
Workbooks CRM edition includes both sales and support functionality in the same licence.
Salesforce requires you to buy both, so if you want the Professional edition for Sales and Service Cloud, it increases to £80 or £140 for Enterprise.