CRM Reading Lounge: CRM & General Articles
CRM ROI Calculator
UNDER REVISION - UPDATES COMING SOON
- Edit the greyed out cells according to company details.
- System cost per user needs to be edited with the figures required to setup your system (i.e. CRM software cost, support, services and hardware).
- Non-greyed cells provide information as stated by the description.
- The ‘Calculations’ worksheet provides the first 12 months of data according to the descriptions given. It is based on existing company data with the addition of new sales leads (or potential sales leads).
- On the ‘Calculations’ worksheet there is an option to rename the ‘New Sales Leads from…’. This income estimator is generated by taking the total monthly sales leads and multiplying it by a percentage of sales that are expected to be closed out.
Even an entry-level CRM is designed to minimize the effort and time involved in sales and marketing processes and tasks that can be automated and streamlined, e.g. time spent gathering customer information, time spent entering, linking and extracting data across modules, and time spent on building useful reports. (Studies have shown that mobile access to CRM applications alone increased salespeople’s productivity by 15%.) So, if you’ve been putting off investing in a CRM because of the costs involved, think again. The ROI calculator on this page can help you quickly quantify the initial cost of implementing a CRM and the time it will take to recoup those costs, plus identify the increases in productivity, and consequently sales, that you can reasonably expect.
To use the CRM Roi Calculator Identify your current sales scenario In the greyed out cells in the BLUE section of the “ROI” worksheet, enter your current sales averages, number of reps and monthly leads. With 200 new leads between them and an average sales amount of $1000, the two sales reps in this example have managed a 50% sales closure rate.
Automating sales strategies can increase profits. In this example, you can see the potential results of implementing an automated email marketing campaign.
Calculate the potential cost of implementing a CRM. In the greyed out cells in the ORANGE section of the “ROI” worksheet, you can calculate the cost of a CRM system and how long it will take you to recoup your investment. To do this, you need to identify the potential increase in productivity you can reasonably expect (“Productivity Percentage Increase Factor After Automating”). In this example, we see the cost of implementing a CRM for our two sales reps can be recouped in a month.
TIP: To help you identify your company’s “Productivity Percentage Increase Factor After Automating”, READ THE BOOK.
A reasonable estimate can initially be based on the time taken for staff to do repetitive and manual tasks, e.g. creating monthly reports and emailing them to colleagues, identifying potential leads from emails and surveys, and supporting customer queries and problems.
Research shows that most employees complain their time is wasted answering colleagues’ queries that could be answered by shared use of an effective document repository, monitoring and sharing email correspondence, training new staff on basic company guidelines and hierarchies, and manually building a database of leads, keeping track of them and sharing them.
It’s just a small step then to translate time wasted into a dollar value for each employee according to their role and salary, and offset this against the cost of a CRM.
Calculate your potential sales forecast with the addition of new leads
The “Calculations” worksheet displays the monthly sales increases over a year that you can expect from the addition of new sales leads (you can rename the ‘New Sales Leads from…’ cells). CRM applications typically focus on the automation of lead generationand powerful sales management and follow-up.