Does investing in CRM reduce expenses? According to Nucleus, the payoff can be rapid (research ZDNet noted as well). CRM isn’t just an investment in driving revenue, it’s also a tool that helps control expenses and add efficiency to an organization. An important fact about the research is that companies who had this level of success had CRM implementation projects built around the tool, rather than a simple install/use plan. We find this is important as well – matching key business processes to your CRM makes the investment pay off.
Nucleus in their own words:
Although CRM is often first considered as a top-line investment to drive increased sales, many projects also yield direct benefits as well. In fact, in terms of overall financial value the CRM projects studied in this analysis delivered 63 percent direct benefits, such as cost savings or avoided hires, and 37 percent indirect benefits, such as increased productivity or greater customer retention.
When going through the CRM implementation process, we virtually always find ways it can be used to reduce operations overhead and improve process efficiency. Employee time digging up customer sales, project, billing, and general information is expensive. Using a properly implemented CRM to find this information quickly reduces the amount of communication/research time, driving down costs.
Quality CRM also helps a company scale. When a company is growing revenue it often becomes resource constrained. Usually that’s because processes need to span more people and the people managing those processes need to get more done. Adding a good CRM application to that process reduces the amount of time each person spends managing day to day work. Good CRM implementations automate those redundant processes and allow each FTE in an organization to manage the process instead of run it manually.
If you’re interested in getting more done, spend time looking at how CRM can improve your bottom line. We’ve done it in many companies, and would be happy to help.
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