Developing a successful CRM budget

Yes, it’s the start of the new year but for businesses, another crucial period is still around the corner, the fiscal year.

Apart from centralizing all your customer database, you must be aware of the various benefits of implementing a CRM.

Implementing a CRM is a tough decision for the business owners.

But if they want their sales reps to close deals quickly and manage leads more efficiently, then CRM implementation is essential.

When businesses decide for CRM implementation, they get mauled over by the dozens of sales pitches, demos and quotes from vendors.

But before you decide on selecting that perfect CRM and go after the ROI of a CRM, you must consider developing a successful CRM budget.

What must be done?

We are listing the methods you can follow while you are preparing your CRM budget.

Identify CRM costs and add them to the budget

The transparent charges of a CRM budget are listed below. But before implementing the CRM make sure you have a frank conversation regarding the hidden costs of CRM implementation with the vendor.

• Analysis of the need and vendor selection
• The cost of Baseline system
• Training Cost
• Migration Cost (Opportunity Cost)
• Customization and dashboard setup
• Storage Cost
• Integration Costs

The above mentioned are bare minimum costs. While using a CRM, you need to set up various fields and operating protocols for your organization.

Justify the investment cost while selecting the CRM of your choice

There are numerous ways of assessing an investment that you are about to make.

Revenue impact

As this is a contextual scenario, determining the revenue impact is a tricky and laborious task, but you must try and quantify it.

The organization’s overall revenue or division of the CRM is one of the factors that affect the actual figure.

Drill down deeper and find out:

• revenue per user
• customer acquisition cost or conversion rate

Cost impact

Predict the potential cost savings from the CRM implementation.

It varies on many factors, from cheaper bookkeeping to a customized reporting feature:

• quantify the cost saving
• average out the current costs
• review costs
• have a metric to look for cost-saving in the new CRM
• look at an ROI from a cash perspective for at least three to five years

Consider the deployment model

The budget also depends on the type of CRM you want to deploy, a cloud CRM or an on-premise CRM.

Cloud computing is trending in the CRM industry.

According to a recent survey, 79% of respondents they were working on a cloud project underway, or it was in the pipeline.

Advantages of cloud CRM:

• Least upfront cost

Cloud CRM operate on SaaS model, and users pay per user per month fee.

• Ability to scale quickly

Cloud CRM providers scalable solutions where the user can add functionality when they need it.

• Ease of setup

No hardware replacement required

Recommended Reading: Small Business Owners Can Dream Big With Cloud CRM

On-premises offers one clear advantage ’ control.

Storing in the cloud does handover control to a third party, which can cause issues with:

• Service disruptions

Rare to happen but if it occurs then you are completely depending on the vendors speed.

• Data retrieval

If the connection is not strong data retrieval becomes tough in case you have not backed it up locally.

• Regulatory concern

Administrators and customers might be concerned about the location of data storage.

Break down the quantifiable goals and features

You can make up your mind for having these features to control your budget.

Ease of implementation

For a successful implementation, you need the CRM to get up and running in a lesser amount of time.

For many businesses, the critical features to look in a CRM are – sales automation capabilities and streamlined sales pipeline management.

Decide on a solution that is sophisticated in security but provide the user flexibility of use.

Remote access

The trend of work from home and having a remote workforce has taken center stage in the business communities because of the many benefits it provides.

The cloud-based system provides the flexibility of remote access to the users from anywhere.

If you do not have such policies, then keep the idea of having such scenario open so that it can fit into the feature list of your CRM in the future also.

Customization

Consider the fact of getting your app developed for supporting one or the other verticals of your business process.

The ability to build customizable features must be considered when selecting a CRM for your business.

Changes are bound to take place after the initial CRM setup, and you must keep this as part of your CRM future budget.

Integrations

Connecting your CRM with a legacy system for easing your business process is also a factor.

You must understand that your selected CRM should have the flexibility of integrating with such apps.

Typically, CRM charges depend on the extra features.

This might add to your overall costing, especially if you are paying per user/per month.

Conclusion

For ensuring a complete ROI from your CRM, you must encourage a culture where your sales force uses CRM for their daily sales task.

Allow them to learn and provide them on-hand training whenever it is required.

Are you looking for a CRM software that can connect you with the world of supporting apps.

Enhance the way you communicate with your prospects and customers without blowing up your budget?

Salesmate will fit right into your CRM budget.

It has all the required features that can help startups and SMBs carry out their business process successfully.

If you have any more query about Salesmate and its features, get in touch with our team and they will happily guide you through the entire process.