Customer Relationship Management, also known as CRM, can be an effective tool for reducing costs while at the same time raising productivity.
In today’s world of ‘do more with less’, more and more organizations are opting to look at CRM as a critical Line of Business (LOB) application (or in the cases where they’ve already implemented CRM, optimizing their existing deployment to take advantage of new features and business processes).
Let’s focus on how CRM can reduce costs for your business in this article with 7 easy ways:
1. A single source of the truth
Instead of disparate and siloed data, a centralized CRM system can bring organizational data under one ‘roof’ and allow for collaboration and optimization of business processes. Additionally, with centralized reporting, organizations can efficiently view and manage resources, sales opportunities and support cases.
How Costs are Lowered – Instead of lost or wasted effort whereby multiple resources do the same thing (or do one thing inefficiently – such as support intake that needs to be handed off (and original instructions are unclear causing back and forth)), individuals can look at information with a 360 degree view.
2. A single system for multiple workloads
Organizations can benefit from what most CRM systems deliver out of the box – Sales, Marketing and Case/Support Management. While most CRM systems offer flavors of variation with regard to features and functionality, almost every CRM system has these core features. Additionally, they can almost always be used relationally – meaning that marketing efforts can focus around a single effort or product, resulting in a potential sales opportunity and finally can have specific case or support management tied to it. Or not – and these features can be compartmentalized, such as in the case with Line of Business applications.
How Costs are Lowered – Organizations that have successfully deployed CRM can benefit from these features without needing separate systems, thereby reducing their total spend for systems to hand discrete functions.
3. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reduction
A cloud CRM system provides a host of features such as redundancy, scale, availability and lower infrastructure requirements. Additionally, when a system like Microsoft CRM/Sales is used, native integration with M365 Office and things like SharePoint and Azure can reduce the total cost of organizationally required systems.
How Costs are Lowered – Integrated systems provide benefits over separate systems and lower overall TCO as they deliver more value to organizations while reducing maintenance costs and required specialized system knowledge.
4. Marketing is easy
With a CRM system, marketing to customers is an easy to perform function that typically includes the ability to perform drip marketing (scheduled) and allows organizations to upsell, cross sell and gain new market share quickly and easily.
How Costs are Lowered – Segmentation of existing customers versus new (or prospect) base allows for specific marketing efforts to realize greater benefit at lower cost.
5. Collaboration
Removing singled points of contact allow for organizations to share workloads. Either support, sales efforts can be shared across key individuals or groups ensuring no slowdown in efforts and resulting in having customers that much further along in their process without having to wait for a specific resource to be available.
Additionally, with easy collaboration, multiple people at an organization can provide input and resources to help identify and close issues and opportunities.
How Costs are Lowered – Sales are closed quicker resulting in increased revenue and opportunity without delay or potential loss.
6. Data availability
Organizations frequently need an always on workforce – either because they have resources out in the field or because of a mobile first requirement. CRM provides an easy to use interface that includes resource for field service and management (with integrated mapping, routing, etc.) as well as a rich mobile interface that provides essential information quickly and easily.
How Costs are Lowered – Features that can optimize organizational efficiency can be natively delivered and deployed resulting in lower errors and higher results.
7. Better reporting resulting in higher margins
Organizations can easily view and run reports based on previous and forecasted sales. With this data, changes to delivery options, margin levels and even carrying costs can be effected in ways that can’t be done for organizations that don’t have a CRM.
How Costs are Lowered – Optimization benefits along the supply chain, including lower spoilage costs and higher margins.
Let 7Ones help you determine how Microsoft Dynamics Sales CRM can lower costs for your organization by contacting us today.