ROI benefits of a CRM for your business

Guilty of still using an Excel spreadsheet to manage your leads, customers, and sales pipelines? Do you think that a CRM is too expensive or is not appropriate for your small or medium business? Wondering why you can’t increase your income? Customer relationship management (ie CRM) has been a key enabling technology for many successful businesses and has a very attractive ROI.

A few years ago, my two business partners and I agreed that our product was ready for prime time and the task of putting together a sales and marketing strategy fell on my shoulders. I knew a thing or two about marketing, but I had no idea about sales. So I liked most of the sales leaders back then and created an Excel spreadsheet to start capturing our leads, customers, opportunities and create a simple pipeline. I put the spreadsheet on our company intranet so my partners and sales team could access and edit it. He had no idea what a mess he had created…

Our sales team, including myself, spend most of our time on the road visiting potential and current customers; connecting to our VPN in our hotel room to access our intranet and edit our spreadsheet was a huge hassle. We didn’t have an automated way to notify the team when it was time to reconnect with a client for a specific project. Creating a report for our Board meetings was a pain. It was almost impossible to analyze our data and figure out where in the sales stage our opportunities got stuck. Leads weren’t automatically assigned to the right sales person and I had to manually manage them. And I could go on and on and I’m sure many of you have similar stories to tell. The bottom line is that our sales did not meet our expectations. Instead of creating a growth enabler, my spreadsheet was a growth impediment.

After two quarters of snail’s pace growth and two hellish board meetings, it was time for a change. I consulted with my team and called some friends with successful and growing businesses and asked them how they manage their sales process. The answer was unanimous: a cloud-based CRM, with Salesforce.com being the most popular option.

Sure, it wasn’t free like a spreadsheet. But the time I gained from not having to manually manage the spreadsheet, assign leads, and struggle with pipeline reports, I spent in front of customers. According to Salesforce research, salespeople spend 68% of their time not selling! I definitely fit that profile back then. For this reason alone, our CRM paid for itself. Also, keep in mind that most cloud-based CRMs like Salesforce offer monthly rates so you don’t have to shell out an expensive sum up front; making it ideal for small businesses. And with Salesforce partners offering quick-start implementations, you can be up and running with an efficient system in less than 30 days at a reasonable price.

As you can imagine, the ROI from our CRM was felt in less than 2 quarters. No more VPN on our intranet for our sales team, they could access our cloud based CRM and update their own pipeline. Back then, smartphones weren’t available, but today, sales teams can update their portfolio on the go right on their phone. All pipelines were integrated into a company pipeline that we could share internally and with our board. It allowed us to analyze our data and figure out how to adjust our sales strategy. We constantly iterate our sales process based on the data we collect. For example, we define best practices for sales and guidance based on the stage of the opportunity. This made the process of onboarding new sales reps easier. We shorten our sales cycle with automatic reminders to contact our customers and follow up on opportunities. And voilà, our sales growth was on solid footing. Later we sold our company to the French multinational Schneider Electric.

In short, a CRM will pay for itself through better visibility, productivity, and intelligence. Our sales team had better visibility into their pipeline, spent more time selling, and were more efficient. The bottom line can be summed up with this equation: the monthly CRM license cost of $130/per seat is always less than the hours wasted by salespeople without a CRM * their hourly rate; Factor in your increased productivity and it’s a no-brainer. Are you sure you want to continue with your spreadsheet?