Measuring ROI on a new CRM purchase.

CRM software purchase, as any other investment in a company, should be evaluated deeply, specialy nowadays as it is still not percibed as a must have for many companies.

It is easy to demonstrate and that you need an ERP or Accountant software, but when we talk about CRM area where the most used tool to do this kind of work is Excel combined with Outlook, and we talk about collaborative CRM, ROI is hard to demonstrate.

We enter in the world of perceptions and nice phrases like "improve customer satisfaction" and similar and we have nothing to compare with which makes it even more dificult.

If you are facing a Customer Support CRM implementation your job will be easier, because you will probably already use metrics.

Yes! thats what I suggest you, no matter what is your business, if you need to show the ROI of a CRM investment you need to have your KPI because your Key Performance Indicators will give you an idea of your performance before and after the implementation.

And one of the magical things of the CRM is to give you this kind of metrics with ease, helping you and your team in the day by day work, reducing the time you invest in administrative tasks and improving your team eficency, you are also feeding a system with valuable data that will automate the way you get metrics and dashboards (KPIs).

If you are facing a Sales team CRM implementation you probably are thinking of CRM because you live in the guess world and want to go the know world. To do so you need to define your KPI and evaluate how an improvement on them repercute on your revenue.

On the ten years I have been learning and enjoying CRM and diferent business models, I have seen SMEs and big companies and some of them didn´t have this defined, and just wanted a forecast tool or a collaborative tool.
Others spent days preparying this information and based it on unaccurate data and so, you have to take this as another CRM advantage as you are capturing the data on a day by day basis and being able to consult it whenever you whant.

You already know that CRM is good for your company, you need to see the ROI you get with it, use KPIs.

Reducing the maduration period of a sell from 10 to 7 days allows you to do one more sell in a month per rep...

Define 5 KPIs that make sense to your business, calculate them as accurate as you can now and calculate how an improvement on them will affect your company´s revenue and you will have a way to meassure the ROI.

Don´t forget all the cualitative things you are also getting when implementing a CRM nor that CRM is not a software but a strategy.