A recent article from ComputerWorld discusses 5 relevant business benefits of CRM. They are:

Business Payoff #1: Increased sales productivity, improved profitability. A properly implemented SaaS CRM system can mean measurable improvements in deal win rates, number of deals completed per sales rep, and higher average sale prices (ASPs).

Business Payoff #2: Better visibility and control.

Business Payoff #3: Less waste in marketing and sales. John Wannamaker’s famous quote, “only half my advertising works I just don’t know which half,” seems to apply to all marketing activities. But a well-configured CRM system can provide pretty solid measurement of marketing effectiveness, with ROI metrics down to the individual campaign level.

Business Payoff #4: Business agility, competitive responsiveness. The CRM system will provide you with the metrics and visibility to identify competitive problems and test solutions for best results. While this applies to any modern CRM system, there’s another level of agility that applies more to SaaS systems that support Agile methods in IT.

Business Payoff #5: Make your priciest business process more reliable. Typically, the highest paid people in the company will be in sales. Yet the company’s most unreliable business process is revenue generation.

The author notes, “Nothing comes for free – Salesforce.com, like any CRM system, is no “point and shoot” miracle. You need to do a lot of work in data cleanup, system integration, and process improvements to enable the business impacts described.”

Here at Myriad Minds, we find that to be 100% true. CRM is a methodology that has significant organisational implications. Managing the “soft” side of a CRM implementation is every bit as crucial as managing the system itself.