Measuring Salesforce CRM Investment - Looking at Metrics, ROI & Beyond

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

The reason companies invested or plan to invest so much money in a CRM system is because they realized it can streamline business processes. This, in turn, results in increase productivity and profits. 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 any company that has just invested in Salesforce CRM, its management would typically want to start doing some number crunching to justify the investment. The management would like to show how the ROI measures up against the baseline figures right away. If you are a manager or project sponsor, 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 systems like Salesforce simplify the process of collecting, tracking and analyzing data. All you need to do is to use metrics to assess the direct and indirect benefits of the CRM system deployment via reports and dashboards.

Performance Metrics by Departments

Since the Salesforce CRM platform focuses on sales, marketing, customer service and IT departments, metrics related to these departments will be very useful. The metrics will help understand the benefits generated by Salesforce 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-selling/up-selling

• The duration of the sales cycle

• The duration of sales rep ramp uptime

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 deflection (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 the successful deployment of a CRM. Salesforce allows the management to track statistics related to the adoption of the CRM. By simply using a 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. The data indicates 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 the satisfaction levels of customers and obtaining feedback on new products and experiences are important parameters. Consider adding Analytics Cloud, where big data analytics solution is integrated into Salesforce CRM platform. This will give you the ability to analyze high volumes of dynamic and volatile data related to all aspects of operations in real-time.

Calculating Salesforce ROI

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

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 customer experience.

Takeaways

Since you will not be able to calculate ROI right away, it is important to keep tracking and analyzing 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 — resulting in business processes being streamlined and standardized.

Salesforce CRM enables different departments to collaborate in a seamless manner and facilitates intelligent decision-making by providing managers with a clear picture of each department's performance.

Furthermore, sales reps enjoy the benefits of automated workflows and get an accurate understanding of their operations. This will result in a shorter sales cycle and shorter sales rep ramp-up time. Ultimately, Salesforce CRM promises a significant return on investment. In fact, Salesforce customers reported they earned an average ROI of 70%.

At Solunus, we are excited to offer our expert services around the Salesforce portfolio. We bring you power world’s best cloud-based CRM. As businesses around the world begin to catch on to the cloud, Solunus helps every customer get the maximum return on their Salesforce investment. If you want to know how Salesforce could help increase your productivity and profit, we are just a phone call away.

About Solunus:

Solunus is a dedicated Salesforce partner organization, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Our unrelenting focus on comprehending the unique needs of our clients coupled with our unrivaled expertise of the Salesforce platform enables us to deliver the perfect solutions that create the best value. Our unflinching commitment to quality and affordability has earned us a 100% Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score from all our customers.