CRM – Seeing the Impact on Your Bottom Line

Picture it. You’re the sales and marketing director of a firm, struggling under a spaghetti highway of various processes and systems, with no clarity and even less integration. You’ve had enough. You dream of the day when cohesion and transparency reign, automatically updated spreadsheets and switched on sales people rule the day. True, the journey to CRM perfection might involve a few headaches – system implementations are never plain sailing – but it will be worth it. We promise.

And the best way to secure your board’s buy in to a new CRM system? It is definitely the message about the impact of CRM on your company’s bottom line – increased revenue generation, better margins, sales people who are all singing from the same hymn sheet. What’s not to love?

In a report which surveyed our customers on the benefits they have realized from CRM, here are the top ways they found CRM helped improve their revenue streams:

• Identifying new sales opportunities: without a CRM system in place, it is nigh on impossible to spot opportunities to cross sell or upsell to your existing client base, or manage sales opportunities with prospective clients, as it will be more ad hoc, far less strategic. The revenue opportunity that we helped a healthcare company identify – from their new CRM system – was $2.8 million, an increase of 10% to their revenue.

• Stopping revenue leakage: in the sales and marketing cycle, revenue leakage can occur through a number of factors – missed opportunities, inefficiencies through poor processes or a lack of integration. Plugging those holes can stop the leak. We helped a recycling firm to stem their revenue leakage – in life before CRM, customers were often billed late or not invoiced at all. Ensuring their sales system were linked to their finance system ensured all customers were billed and billed on time, maximizing the revenue opportunity.

• Improved sales team performance: when it comes to improving the performance of the sales team, you can’t really beat CRM. From sharing and embedding best practice, to tracking success and failure, to action status reports and monitoring individual performance, CRM ensures sales people don’t miss out on chances to cross sell or upsell and they have all the information they need to convert effectively. And so opportunities to add to your firm’s revenue stream. Like one of our client’s, a company specializing in office design, which wanted to improve its sales team performance by 25% – this uplift in productivity and 25% improvement in the conversion rate from the same pipeline, translated into an additional $7 million a year revenue.

And that’s the issue with managing sales and marketing – there are often a whole host of opportunities to boost revenue floating around in the ether – but if you don’t have the right CRM system and processes in place, you will never identify them and it is revenue you will miss out on.

If you want to find out how we helped more of our clients improve their revenue streams, please check out our report.