Measuring Salesforce CRM—Looking at Metrics, ROI & Beyond

Companies continue to make new investments in CRM. Gartner predicts that CRM will become number 1 enterprise software with a $36B revenue by 2017 surpassing ERP software for the first time.

Companies are realizing that CRM is an enterprise software that can streamline business processes and help increase productivity & profits and reduce administrative costs. The bottom line is companies need CRM to help them grow their businesses.

According to Nucleus Research June 2014 report, CRM gives back $8.71 for every dollar spent.

For companies that have just invested in Salesforce CRM, you need to start doing some number crunching to justify your investment and see how your ROI measure up against the baseline figures right away. You might be wondering where to go from here. The good news is that your company has already moved towards becoming a data driven organization where decisions are based on precise, quantifiable, and accurate data. CRM like Salesforce simplifies the process of collecting, tracking, and analyzing data. All you need to do is to focus on quantifiable metrics to assess the direct and indirect benefits of the CRM deployment using Salesforce custom reports.

Performance Metrics by Departments

Since Salesforce CRM platform focuses on sales, marketing, customer service, and IT departments, metrics related to these departments will help the management understand the extent of benefits generated by the deployment of Saleforce CRM.

Sales Metrics

• Number of leads
• Conversion of leads into customers
• Rate of closure and renewal
• Number of deals
• Number of sales calls made
• Revenue generated
• Revenue generated from cross sell/up sell
• The duration of the sales cycle
• The duration of sales rep ramp up time

Marketing Metrics

• The number of campaigns planned and implemented
• New leads and customers acquired from each campaign
• Customer responses through all channels including website, social media, and mobile marketing
• The revenue generated from each campaign
• Lead conversion rate
• Number of leads from social sources

Data covering campaigns, durations, and teams will help the management get a comprehensive view of the impact of CRM.

Customer Services Metrics

• Number of complaints and issues
• The average case resolution time
• Average calls per day
• Conversion of visitors into leads through proactive customer engagement.
• Number of first call (or contact) resolution
• Cost of service/support
• Customer satisfaction
• New agent onboarding/ramp-up time
• Customer retention
• Number of call defection (via self-service)

Partner/Channel Management Metrics

• Number of partners registered
• Increase in collaboration with partners
• New partner onboarding time
• Partner deal registration
• Increase in partner deal win rate

IT Metrics

• Deployment time
• Configuration time
• Design time
• System testing time
• Integration time
• Coding productivity
• IT costs (e.g. support/admin, development, integration, infrastructure management, user training, upgrades)

Collaboration Metrics

• Improvement in finding information and expertise quickly
• Increase in employee satisfaction
• Increase in employee engagement
• Improvement in employee productivity
• Increase in employee connections
• Increase in innovation/idea generation
• Reduction in email usage
• Reduction in meetings

User Adoption Metrics

Enthusiastic acceptance and adoption are essential for successful deployment of a CRM. Salesforce allows the management to track statistics related to adoption of the CRM. By simply using login history report to track the number of logins made by employees, the management can quantify the extent of user adoption.

Another important metric is the completeness and accuracy of the data entered by agents, which is an indicator of the extent to which the CRM is being used in a sincere and holistic manner.

Customer Satisfaction Metrics

Since CRM is designed to simplify customer relationship management, assessing satisfaction levels of customers and obtaining feedback on new products and experience are important parameters. Consider adding Analytics Cloud—where big data analytics solution is integrated into Salesforce CRM platform—for the ability to analyze high volumes of dynamic and volatile data related to all aspects and facets of operations on a real-time basis.

Calculating Salesforce ROI

To measure the ROI of Salesforce investment, companies need to take into account the overhead costs of Salesforce subscription services, personnel, consulting (expenses that got the system up and running), hardware, and training over a 3-year period comparing to the overhead costs prior to implementing Salesforce.

You also need to look into quantified direct and indirect benefits using information from performance metrics and also benefits that can’t be quantified such as user adoption and customer satisfaction metrics. An increase in profit may not be sustainable if there is a reduction in the quality of the consumer experience.

When you have everything ready, here is an online tool that help you calculate CRM ROI.

Takeaways

Since you will not be able to calculate revenue or profit numbers immediately, it is important to keep track and analyze the qualitative impact of Salesforce CRM on your business.

When implemented correctly, Salesforce CRM should be easily adopted by users without significant disruptions within the organization—result in business processes being streamlined and standardized.

Salesforce CRM enables different departments to collaborate in a seamless manner and facilitates intelligent decision making by informing managers a clear picture of the performance of the department. Sales reps enjoy the benefits of automated workflows and get accurate understanding of their sales operations, which will result in a shorter sales cycle and shorter sales rep ramp up time. Ultimately, Salesforce CRM promises significant return on investment. In fact, Salesforce customers reported that they earned an average 70% return on investment. Now what is yours?

Source From : http://www.kairostech.com/measuring-salesforce-crm-looking-at-metrics-roi-beyond/