Maximize the ROI of Your CRM Solution: Learn How to Get the Most for the Least

those sources so you can focus the marketing."

CRM also helps identify star performers. If you have a sales team that is outpacing others or a particular agent with stellar numbers, you can identify them and build best practices around their work. More than that, though, CRM provides a context. For instance, on face value, you might have a sales team that looks outstanding. It may outperform other teams by many multiples, but maybe it just operates in a rich territory. Maybe it's underperforming, but looks great when stacked against teams working with less rewarding spaces. You wouldn't want to build best practices from a team like that. CRM provides the tools to make these sort of evaluations.

However, CRM is not magic.

If there's something you can do wrong, you're probably already doing it

When CRM asked consultants what the most common mistakes they routinely saw among client companies were, nearly all of them pointed to the onboarding phase. Enterprises often have unreasonable expectations. Perhaps fueled by the siren call of vendors who tout sales cycles that have dropped from 80 days to 60 days and increased customer support capacity to the tune of 60 percent, they go into a roll-out thinking that a CRM solution is going to take care of itself. That it will just automatically whisper the right words to salespeople to close sales and divine the best outreach campaigns for marketing teams.

Ryan Plourde, CEO of AbleBridge, a Microsoft Dynamics partner, cautions against that kind of easy money thinking.

&Where companies don't get an ROI," he argues, "they don't have internal stakeholders that are responsible for the CRM system. Someone should have direct oversight of the terminology and the system at large. Otherwise, you get six months in and things start to get too loose. A company will rely solely on [its] partner. It's very costly to spend constant money on an external stakeholder."

And would you really want an external stakeholder defining best practices for your agents? That's more or less outsourcing central corporate strategy. One of the strengths of a good CRM system is that it gives cohesion to a business mission. As any hack who is familiar 

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