Top 10 Reasons for Using a Client Relationship Manangement (CRM) System

If your company is not using a Client Relationship Management (CRM) software or a CRM system, then you are probably missing a good opportunity to increase revenues and reduce costs.

There are numerous benefits to properly implementing CRM software and I have gone through several web site and compiled information into a top 10 list.

Top 10 Reasons Your Company Should Use CRM Software:

1. Revenue increases of up to 41% per sales representative - That's $410,000 additional on every $1M in quota.
2. Decrease sales cycles by over 24% - If you average sale takes 4 months, this is like adding 1 additional sale per year.
3. Lead conversion rate improvements by over 300%
4. Increase customer retention improvements by 27% - This can have a significant impact on adding to the bottom line - less costly to maintain a current client then to get a new one.
5. Decrease sales and marketing costs by 23% - Huge impact on the overall performance of a company.
6. Improve profit margins by over 2% - This also has a significant impact on the overall performance of a company.
7. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%
8. 65% of a businesses revenue is generated by loyal repeat clients - Understand what clients are your best clients and get to know them and their spending habits - Upsell them!!!
9. 80% of sales leads are lost, ignored or discarded - Just because someone didn't buy in the past doesn't mean that they are not interested today - Follow up.
10. 73% of organizations have no process to requalifying or revisting business leads - Gain business that you didn't have before.

An interesting piece of information that IDC reported is that ROI from CRM is between 16% and 1000% and that half of all companies surveyed see between 50% and 500% on ROI.

The whole concept behind these figures is that you adhere to a process to manage sales and by managing this process, the benefits will follow. Key to making a CRM system work is to understand what you want to accomplish and implement CRM to meet your goals. Over 50% of all CRM implementations are deemed to be a failure due to the fact that there was not a proper implementation to meet the objectives that were desired. So just implementing CRM alone is not the answer. Determining what you want to accomplish and mapping it out is where you want to start.

If you would like to understand how Avanade can help you leverage the power of CRM for your organization, please feel free to contact Chris Hamilton in Calgary at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com .

Avanade offers a hosted model in addition to a client server model.