How CRM Can Help You Reduce Operational Costs

Your guide to operational and financial efficiency with CRM.

Niche or sector aside, your business must remain adaptable, efficient, and forward-thinking to succeed in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

Unfortunately, many of today’s businesses waste untold amounts of time and money on weak decision-making and poor processes.

Studies show that companies around the world waste a collective $1 million (£725,300) every ten seconds on poorly executed strategies and inefficient processes. This colossal overspend on unnecessary operational costs is financially crippling to businesses across industries. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

We live in a time where technology can be used to drive down operational costs consistently. CRM software is one of those technologies, empowering you to run at maximum efficiency while boosting your revenue, driving down operation costs, and accelerating the growth of your business.

Here’s how:

Automating tasks

By allowing you to automate certain operational tasks, CRM will empower your teams to do more for less.

Rather than wasting time on repetitive administration tasks or outsourcing the work, you can use CRM software to execute those tasks so that your employees can focus on more intricate or value-driven activities.

To put this into practical perspective, CRM software can help automate:

• Lead Management: An automated workflow can take the guesswork out of assigning leads to your sales representatives, based on specific rules you have set up. You can easily eliminate manual errors and speed up the overall process, ensuring your leads are followed up in a timely and effective manner.
• Lead Nurturing: CRM automation can assist you with drip emails (if tightly integrated with Marketing Automation), follow-ups, lead scoring, metrics and reports. A highly efficient CRM can record sales and marketing engagement as well as set corresponding scores for every lead generated. It can even automatically push nurturing emails and take advantage of opportunities based on the data it gathers.
• Calling or Telephony: CRM can automate tasks like call recording, one-click dial, automatic notes, automated follow-up emails etc. The system can also set up tasks that need to be accomplished after every call to the relevant sales rep, increasing productivity and efficiency.
• Pipeline Management: Businesses with sales pipelines involving multiple stages particularly benefit from CRM automation. By implementing an automated workflow, it’s easy to simplify tasks like transferring ownership from one rep to another the moment an opportunity makes it to a new stage and creating activities every time an opportunity reaches a new stage in the sales cycle. Another example is triggering the system to move a lead to the next queue in your pipeline once it responds to an email about scheduling a sales call – increasing your staff’s productivity, while establishing a dependable and winning set of best practices.
• Customer Support: Automation can empower your customer support team by sending pre-populated responses to flagged concerns, assigning reps to particular cases – improving the way you handle inquiries and driving a better customer experience.
• Finance: Gone are the days of manually sending out every invoice to individual customers every billing cycle. With an automated workflow, you can task your CRM to trigger each time a client completes a purchase. This is especially valuable for B2C companies that face a high volume of transactions. Other companies that particularly benefit from CRM automation are businesses that use a subscription model, where CRM can easily help automate the renewal process.

Read: Our essential whitepaper “CRM to optimise your business”.

Identifying trends

By providing centralised access to robust, reliable data, CRM platforms will give you the insight you need to identify emerging trends in all key areas of the business.

Identifying key trends means that you can capitalise on strengths while spotting operational weaknesses and making strategic tweaks to improve efficiency.

Through CRM trend analysis, you might discover that your customer acquisition costs are rising or that your average sales cycle has dramatically increased. By spotting emerging trends, you can take immediate actions, looking at recent sales and marketing activities and see what you can tweak to improve performance.

For example, if you find that your recent marketing emails have a poor open rate, you can refine your customer segmentation efforts to ensure you’re targeting the right customers with the right messaging while improving your subject lines.

By gaining company-wide access to the right insights, you will be able to make accurate decisions while offering direct value to your customers. As a result, you will reduce unnecessary operational costs and improve internal communication while increasing your revenue.

Effective & efficient customer service

It’s no secret that seamless client or customer service will set you apart from the competition.

If you want to meet the needs of your customers head-on without wasting unnecessary time and money, upkeeping best practices while streamlining every stage of the customer lifecycle is essential.

With CRM software, you can track and measure customer engagement, touchpoints, and customer enquiries with pinpoint accuracy. You can also calculate how much every aspect of your customer service strategy costs you. This will give you the data and tools to make specific strategic improvements.

CRM offers a wealth of customer service metrics that will help you streamline your customer service, sales, and marketing processes.

For example, customer lifetime value (CLV) offers an in-depth insight into how valuable your customers are during their entire relationship with your business.

Analysing this metric regularly will help you gauge how you can improve your customer experience (CX) offerings, boost purchasing value, and encourage loyalty. CRM will help you define your ideal, most profitable customers more clearly and give you an understanding of how to best manage them.

Shareholder value

By demonstrating that your business has streamlined its major processes while tackling financially-draining issues such as low staff productivity, long-winded processes, and poorly placed resources, you will increase shareholder value, which will have a positive impact on the business.

Increasing shareholder value will give you the affirmation that you’re growing your business sustainably, while increased operational efficiency and a better bottom line are likely to encourage more investment, accelerating the growth of your company in the process.

The return on investment of CRM software used to its full advantage can exceed 245%. That’s a healthy ROI that will benefit the financial health of any business.

Read: Our whitepaper ‘Building shareholder value with CRM ‘

Final thoughts

“Efficiency is doing better than what is already being done.”―Peter F. Drucker

CRM will allow you to substantially improve and streamline your most important processes. You can embed best practices throughout your team and their areas of operation while reducing inefficiencies across the board.

We live in a fast-paced digital age, and if you want to thrive in the long term, there is no room for wasting time or shooting in the dark. You need to be swift and accurate, as well as ensure your processes offer internal and external value across the board.

Workbooks’ CRM solution is 50 to 70% less expensive than Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics and offer a powerful and scalable all-in-one CRM and marketing automation solution to suit all business models and sizes. To find out about us and what we do, get in touch.