While building a business case for a major investment, whether it be for a new hire, new piece of equipment, or even a company acquisition, it is very crucial that you present the ROI which shows a rapid return for the investment. And the same theory is true for software solutions such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). With more functionalities of Mobile CRM like automation and access to real-time information, businesses today have many more options to support strategic goals, communicate almost in real-time, and build long lasting and profitable relationships with customers.
You may consider the top capabilities as follows in order to guarantee ROI from your CRM implementation:
- Mobile CRM boost sales productivity: According to a new Nucleus Research report, social and mobile access to CRM applications increased the productivity of sales people by 26.4 percent. Apart from this, mobile solution can help the CRM with broader corporate objectives. The software is quickly moving beyond apps with improved functionalities. The better visibility of the app allowed sales people to more readily identify accounts they need to contact on the basis of location and pipeline and helped managers keep better tabs on which accounts need to be managed proactively.
- Choose features wisely: Focus your efforts on using more features that actually matter to your business, and less on the features that you don’t need. Many CRM systems aren’t customized to fit your business needs. Investing in additional features, integration or customization, automating critical workflows and business processes within your system can take it to the next level. All this will further help increase productivity and thus an increase in your ROI.
- Get Social: Social networking is, perhaps, the biggest trend and change facing IT professionals. Clients expect to directly communicate with their brands and vendors, and companies must quickly respond via the same channels. “For years we have focused too much on the management of our customer relationships, and we now need to focus much more on the relationship part, we need to collaborate, we need to inject a sense of mutual benefit into everything we do with our customers,” said Gartner research director Jim Davies.
- Analyze Data: Organizations that integrates mobile CRM systems and social networks not only satisfy customers’ desire to communicate over multiple channels, they also generate structured and unstructured data. If those data is associated with powerful analytic tools, the software solution is going to provide businesses insight into their customers, trend information, and valuable research document.
These analytic tools can drill-down further into the consumers’ information, either private information collected through interactions between company and client, or public data collected through the customer’s postings on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Combining together, this information creates a holistic view of the clients, their likes and dislikes, giving businesses a better ability for effective marketing, product-development, and support offerings to customers’ specific needs. - Ensure that manager act on data: Sales managers will need to take a look of the information and reports from the mobile CRM like Realso Sales CRM. They not only analyze them, they should also act on them. For example, if they find that several leads are exiting the sales funnel at the demo stage, they should begin the process of changing the demo.If they find out that there are hundreds of leads that they are not in touch over a year, they should make a marketing agenda to nurture them and change processes that their sales reps follow. If they aren’t willing to take time to analyze reports or make changes based on them, they won’t be taking advantage of the power of their CRM.
- Consider ongoing maintenance costs: Sometimes you may overlook the ongoing maintenance costs for the software due to steep upfront costs associated with deployment of on-premises licensed software. You should also consider these.
What is the annual vendor maintenance fee associated with the license? Is there enough support built into the vendor subscription fees, or any extra charges for premium support? What ongoing application maintenance and user help desk support is required? How will maintenance costs grow over time? Is third-party maintenance a better alternative? - User Adoption: User adoption poses a challenge after mobile CRM deployments. One of the main reason that CRM adoption fails due to the low user adoption. One of the best ways to achieve successful CRM user adoption is to define the roles for each team and its members within the project. Involve your team early, from the start till the end of the implementation process.
Training part is equally important. Make sure that the users are taught how to use every part of the system, that they will be required to utilize in the CRM. Also, ensure that user adoption is encouraged at all levels of management.