Benefits of CRM

The CRM Mastery E-Journal reports on a survey by CSO Insights:

"We asked participating sales executives to assess the impact that technology was having on their sales performance. A consolidated review of their responses found that 71.9 percent stated that CRM was improving their performance, 18.2 percent said it was having no effect, and 9.9 percent didn't know.

Initially we see that for more than seven of 10 firms there is a plus side to their CRM initiative. But these figures prompt a follow-up question: What exactly is different as a result of using this technology? To get a more definitive answer we asked these execs to get specific about what "better" looked like now that the CRM applications were in the hands of their salespeople.

The article includes a chart analyzing the "Benefits Resulting from CRM Usage." Here are the top 10 benefits:

1. Improved Communications - 60+%


2. Improved Forecast Accuracy - 50%


3. Reduced Administrative Burden - 40+%


4. Increased Revenues - 30%


5. Improved Best Practice Sharing - 25+%


6. Shortened Sell Cycles - 20+%


7. Reduced New Rep Ramp-Up Time - 20+%


8. Improved Win Rates - 20%


9. Improved Order Processing - 15+%


10. Increased Margins - 10%"

IMHO: Sounds good doesn’t it? But the problem is putting dollar numbers to improvement, and attributing some of the improvement to CRM. Having gone through a CRM initiative in my own organization recently, while I am a big proponent of the technology, I think CRM has a long way to go to fulfill the promise of “Customer Relationship Management” and more than the technology has to evolve to realize that. I will go into details of this soon. Do let me know your thoughts.

Category:CRM