CRM – Sales Automation
CRM is an efficiency tool designed to automate your Customer Relationship Management processes and improve your sales team’s effectiveness. CRM’s focus on managing and analyzing customer interactions with the goal of strengthening customer relationships, identifying sales-ready prospects and ultimately building sales.
When a CRM is designed, implemented and embraced by your sales team it can be a game-changer for your organization!
How CRM can help your sales team:
✓ Organization: store contacts, sales opportunities, and activities in one place that can be accessed from multiple locations and devices
✓ Time Management: prioritize tasks and optimally allocate time to prospects and customers with automated reminders of touchpoints such as contract renewals and product replacements
✓ Effectiveness: identify and target high value leads in your pipeline based on data and selection criteria
✓ Communication: share calendars, data and documents within your sales team as well as with the Marketing Team
✓ Efficiency: a host of tools allow you to automate repetitive tasks like preparing proposals and quotes, preparation of activity reports and composing emails and document
What types of organizations benefit from a CRM?
CRM’s are used in a wide range of industries and across all sizes of companies. They are most beneficial to companies with these types of attributes:
✓ Companies with Sales Teams
✓ B2B Businesses
✓ Organizations that create proposals and/or quotes
✓ Service Providers
✓ Different employees interact with the same customer
What is the ROI on your CRM investment?
Depending upon the source, estimates range from $5.00 to $9.00 return for every $1 invested in a CRM and its implementation. The measurable benefits come from:
✓ Increased Revenues due to better use of the sales team’s time and improved targeting of prospects
✓ Reduced Costs including by freeing up your sales team’s time so they can call on more customers
✓ Improved Margins through identification of upselling and cross-selling opportunities
✓ Higher Customer Satisfaction and Retention with better follow up and meeting schedules
✓ Eliminated Costs through identification of operational inefficiencies
CRM project implementations fail 30 to 60% of the time – and this has been consistent over the past 13 years according to C5Insight. Studies show that the shockingly high failure rate has nothing to do with the technology. The top 5 reasons CRM projects fail are:
- Lack of clear goals
- No well designed plan
- Lack of commitment of senior leadership
- Lack of user adoption
- Thinking the technology is a replacement for human interaction.
MBI can help you succeed! We provide leadership and support in the following areas:
✓ Identify your CRM goals
✓ Select the tool that will best support your goals within your budget
✓ Develop a CRM implementation plan
✓ Implement and configure the CRM
✓ Integrate CRM with your other systems and processes
✓ Overcoming obstacles!