Don t put it off! Five reasons why you shouldn t defer

Transcription

1 1 Don t put it off! Five reasons why you shouldn t defer your CRM project

2 Don t put it off! Five reasons why you shouldn t defer your CRM project 85% 25-30% Here s a frank disclosure: many businesses that start evaluating CRM projects don t end up buying one. Of those who do, 85% end up with the wrong one. Companies that don t buy are usually constrained by budgets and short-term thinking CRM is a long-term investment, and if you get it right you can: Bring all of your business processes into one Cloud-based solution to improve scalability, reliability, efficiency and resource management; Cut costs, grow revenue and improve overall customer retention. But because of the initial investment required to implement a successful CRM project, in both time and money, lots of businesses stick with what they ve already got. What they ve already got is usually separate silos of information in each department, and no ability to accurately track, measure and forecast across the entire business. Guess what the result of this is? Growth that lags far behind those companies who take a long-term approach. 2

3 Long-Term Value Let s take a troublesome car. (Bear with us). No matter how many times you repair it, something else soon goes wrong. See what we re driving at? Taking a short-term approach to CRM means you ll end up spending more time and money patching up the flaws, while losing more customers in the long run. There s a reason that investments in CRM, particularly those delivered as Cloudbased SaaS solutions, continue to rise: they enable businesses to get better results and keep on getting them. Here are five reasons why you really shouldn t wait any longer to implement that CRM project: Reason 1: Increase customer retention In the 2012 report: The Path Best Taken: Leveraging CRM in Pursuit of the Elusive Single View of the Customer, which defines the companies involved in the research as: 91% 83% 10% Best-in-Class (top 20%) Industry Average (middle 50%) Laggard (bottom 30%) Best-in-class companies were shown to use a combination of strategic actions, core competencies and technology enablers to achieve a 91% average current customer retention rate, compared to 83% for Industry Average and a pretty poor 10% for Laggards. With 77% of the Best-in-Class also having pure customer service staff, which are not responsible for pursuing or selling net-new customers (compared to 71% of Industry Average and 56% of Laggards), it seems that not treating every conversation as a potential sales pitch also goes a long way in keeping the customers happy and loyal. 3

4 Reason 2: Cut sales cycles Another recent report, Better Sales Forecasting Through Process and Technology: No Crystal Ball Required, revealed that Best-in-Class organisations see a 6.5% year-overyear reduction in the average length of the sales cycle. There is a reduction of just 1.1% in Industry Average firms, while Laggard companies are actually seeing the length of the sales cycle increase by 4.7% a year. The top-performing businesses are using CRM solutions that provide more accurate sales forecasts. They are doing this by joining up all of the business processes to provide a fuller picture of the customer journey from lead to conversion. This means they can compare the messaging, the contact points and the journey time of sales. Identifying which are quick to convert and which are not is key to identifying how to improve sales and marketing processes. Reason 3: Align sales and marketing Sales and Marketing Alignment: The New Power Couple revealed that the Best-in-Class companies tend to join up their sales and marketing teams using a CRM solution. This allows them to access all the same collateral and customer data. It also helps implementation of structures lead nurturing programmes. The upshot of all this? A 31.6% average year-over-year growth in company revenue. Impressive figures especially when you consider its only 18.2% growth for the Industry Average companies. Laggards, yet again, are seeing things worsen; these companies see a 6.7% average decrease in annual revenue. Reason 4: Improve data management In businesses that don t have a CRM system, important prospect and customer data is scattered all over the place (think business cards, notepads, Post-Its, s, documents, spreadsheets, peoples brains...) This chaos results in costly inefficiencies and missed potential revenue opportunities. A Cloud-based CRM brings together all this siloed information and enables everyone to access it from anywhere, at any time. The 2012 Data Quality Insight report from Capscan revealed that 66% of respondents believe that the quality of data is of vital importance to enable businesses to remain successful. Ensuring that everyone in your organisation can remain informed and competitive is a project that needs to happen sooner rather than later. 4

5 Reason 5: Achieve greater efficiencies By moving all business processes (marketing, sales, finance and customer service) onto one Cloud-based platform and making all data accessible in one place, efficiency can be achieved across all departments. In the IT department, for example, there will be fewer software solutions to support and less data to back up locally. Other departments will no longer have to search in multiple file directories on the network or wait for colleagues to send info. Everything will always be available for everyone to access. The Path Best Taken: Leveraging CRM in Pursuit of the Elusive Single View of the Customer report showed that: 90% 53% In 90% of Best-in-Class companies, sales contact, opportunity and pipeline information is entered and updated on a regular basis (70% Average/67% Laggards) 53% of Best-in-Class companies had processes to survey customers after interactions to continuously measure and aggregate customer satisfaction results (32% Average /31% Laggards) The right CRM system enables your business to increase efficiency and understand its customers better. What s more, your teams will work more closely together. Gartner estimates 35% of all CRM implementations today use SaaS and this will grow to over 50% by 2020 according to their projections. So with your competitors investing in the tools they need to remain competitive, there are many reasons why you shouldn t be deferring your CRM project. Find out more about a free Workbooks trial now! Get my FREE Trial! 5