CRM to drive revenue growth

Revenue is the lifeblood of every organisation and so it is a key metric for all senior executives. CRM helps drive revenue growth by enabling you to optimise the investment you make in sales and marketing, and by giving you a better understanding of who your customers are and what they want.

Firstly it allows you to identify issues with your sales and marketing activity. It gives you a clear view of whether your investment in the sales and marketing people you hire and the marketing campaigns you run are delivering the results you need.

It allows you to compare the performance of salespeople and teams, spotting those who are not delivering and then providing the appropriate interventions. It allows you to easily see which routes to market are not working well and take steps to address the problem. It may be that some of your products are less competitive than others, or marketing campaigns that perform worse than others – once you know this you can pinpoint issues, take steps to address them and target spending in the right places.

On the flip side of this, it allows you to identify opportunities. It shows you the high performing salespeople, the successful routes to market, the products flying out the door, and the marketing campaigns producing stellar results. Armed with this knowledge you can increase investment in those areas and look to replicate their success across the business.

For most organisations tackling these two aspects of internal performance will significantly boost revenue growth. However there is a third way CRM can contribute. Ultimately growth in sales results from delivering value to your customers and giving them a reason to purchase from you instead of the competition. By far the best way to achieve this is to get to know them and understand their needs.

This involves a deep understanding of what sets your company apart from its competitors, what makes people loyal or disloyal to you, the trends that will affect you customers and business – and the ones that are already doing so.

Most businesses have this information in patchy, unstructured ways. CRM prompts you to gather this information from your customers, and to store it a single, easily accessed place. It then allows you to segment, crunch and analyse the data to provide actionable insights.

This combination of improved internal performance and detailed customer analysis, is the foundation of revenue growth. Get it right and the effect can be transformative – and for many organisations the first step to doing so is to implement a CRM solution.

To find out how CRM can help you gain more control over your business, read our whitepaper: CRM to Grow your Business – A Guide for Management.