ROI with CRM 4.0

I often demo CRM 4.0 to potential new clients. The software speaks for itself, and very few people fail to see the advantage, however how can you show or demonstrate the Return on investment (ROI) that you could expect?

A recent project provides a good example, because you could actually quantify saved time. Time can easily be equated to cost, so it soon became apparent how saving time would make them more productive.

Example:

The client had a sales process whereby a sales order would be emailed in...This would then be forwarded to the sales administrator who would copy and paste (yes really) the pertinent information and forward that to the warehouse to check stock and availability. The warehouse would then email back. Shipping information was then requested from the shipping department. The sales admin would then print off the information and physically take that for management sign off, then take it to the accounts department who would get payment. Once payment was received, works orders were printed....The list of steps goes on...

The long and short of it was that the whole process was disjointed and manual. If you asked where a sale was in the sales process, it was difficult to see. If you wanted to trace the history of a sale, it was often tangled in a web of paper and emails with no connections.

Joel Abbott (Lead CRM consultant on this project) set out the process and automated a lot of it, including the sign off process, pricing requests, shipping requests and stock management.

You could actually quantify the saving in time!

By fully automating what had been a manual process up to that point, reporting was then much easier. For example a stock level report had to be supplied once a week. The creation of this had taken up to 4 hours. The SQL report can now be run at any time and takes about 30 seconds to run.

Return of investment is vital for businesses. You have to prove your business case when looking to move to a CRM solution. It's easy to see that a well thought out move can save both time and productivity, thus saving money in the long run.