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

complicates what their employees have to input and manage."

Take a moment to consider the long-term goal of complete integration of your CRM solution, and realize that getting your employees to consistently adopt best practices is more easily accomplished if you ease them into it.

"Companies are most successful when they recognize that CRM is not so much a destination as a journey," Sullivan offers. "With CRM, companies should focus on small successes."

Wollen agrees. From Red Hat to Prudential, all of the deployments that he has been a part of at Salesforce.com followed a similar process of increasing refinement. The first goals, even among such large firms, are often shockingly modest.

"They just roll out straightforward CRM capabilities—just to better connect salespeople and understand who the customers are," he says.

In the early stages of a CRM implementation, the work is around defining sales opportunities, figuring out where leads and sales meet. It's not until that baseline is firmly established that best practices are defined, much less rolled out. From there, the sales team is connected to other teams within the business, and the system is allowed to grow in complexity. Connections are found between different teams selling different products, between legal departments and communications, between product lines and their reps. Profiles of customers who may have engagements with a dozen different parts of the business begin to take shape. New efficiencies emerge and business strategies begin to be defined by data.

None of that, however, is done early. It emerges only with time.

Garbage in, garbage out

CRM has the potential to funnel tons of data into your organization, but not all of it is good. CRM asked Vishrut Parikh if he often sees much junk data when a client switches to NetSuite from an older system or even other providers.

"You see tons of useless data," he confesses. "All the time. First and foremost is to just not bring garbage into your CRM. When we begin the implementation, the first thing we ask is 'Yeah, you have data from ten years, but do you need it?'"

Data input should be targeted to goals, Parikh says. Big or small doesn't matter when it comes to data caches. It's about being smart. Some businesses, such as retail, have to collect tons of data because a company might work with hundreds of vendors in hundreds of markets and have to coordinate very complex business decisions. But as much as it is, all of that data has to be focused. Extraneous data slows analysis and even hides important findings.

It can't just be about streamlining your workflow

"Over time, efficiency savings will cop out," AmberLeaf's Goldman says. "When it does, companies should be planning for the business impact of their CRM to grow. There should be growth into more real-time customer dialogues, where the conversations and the reactions by your business are closer to one another. Ideally, you're mastering the technology fairly quickly, to the point where workflow savings are no longer the primary benefit."

"Automation in CRM should drive next actions," Sullivan adds. "There should be automated reminders and warnings. If a customer that has traditionally accounted for significant returns reduces [his or her] transactions with you by 10, 20 percent, that should set off bells and whistles so that you can address the issue. You need to supplement aggregate data with technology that aids in customer service as well."

"We've seen great success in the twofold approach to performance indicators," Parikh says. "Monitoring order processing efficiency has generally yielded an improvement from 45 to 75 percent. At the same time, customer support capacity is key. Are you able to provide the experience that customers are expecting?" Customer support is not just measured by the number of designated customer support reps, he adds. "It's anyone who's talking to the customer. Concentrating on holistic customer support has increased returns for our customers from 25 to 60 percent."

Analysis happens outside of CRM

Above all, one fact bears repeating: Analysis happens outside of the CRM system.

"Often organizations are hoping these [magic] bullets will just tell them what their marketing strategy should be, but that still takes human thought," Goldman says. "You need to bake the data analysis into your project plan. You can't forget to interpret everything you're collecting and organizing with your CRM."

Getting ROI from your CRM requires substantial and steady investment of time and money. That investment means having skill sets on staff. Your CRM manager probably won't be a statistician or a predictive modeler, but you may want to make hires like that to complement the manager if you're planning on using your CRM to make important, big picture decisions. And the bigger those choices, the more capable that analysis is going to have to be.

CRM is not a robot CEO. It's a tool to define and express business strategy—and an expensive one at that. The ROI that you get is as determined by your commitment to it as it is by the strength of the technology. So if you're planning on investing in CRM and seeing that money again, prepare to double down and make big changes.

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Eric Felipe-Barkin is a writer and filmmaker. He contributes to CRM and Speech Technology magazines and is currently at work on a Web series, "Quick Brick Tips."

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