CRM – The Cost of Not Optimising Your Costs

It’s that age old worry in business isn’t it. You have invested in X, Y, Z systems but no one is using them because they are too complex. Or it might be that cumbersome manual processes and a lack of integration are impeding the productivity and efficacy of your sales team and causing errors and poor time management. All of these factors can signal poor cost optimisation.

According to Gartner, the definition of cost optimisation is “a business-focused continuous discipline to drive spending and cost reduction, whilst maximising business value.” In other words, it’s about trying to get the best bang for your buck and making sure your firm maximises the value from whatever it is you are spending money on.

And actually, CRM is really good at helping organisations with their approach to cost optimisation. We spoke to a number of clients about how CRM helped them with cost optimisation and the ways it helped them do it. Here are some examples:

• Automating key processes: an over reliance on manual resource for repetitive work is often more expensive and prone to more error. From a cost optimisation perspective, automating key processes makes sense. The staff of a media firm we worked with were wasting a lot of time on manual processes and weren’t able to gather data for effective decision making – the lack of visibility was costing the business a lot in terms of lost productivity and process gaps meant new customers were signed but not invoiced. The new CRM system automated these processes, improving costs and accuracy.

• Integration, integration, integration: another problem that companies often encounter that inhibits cost optimisation is a lack of integration. Too many companies have disparate systems for sales, marketing, finance – and if they aren’t integrated, cost optimisation is impossible. A lack of integration for a recycling firm was costing them dearly – all sales data was either in the sales team’s heads or on a spreadsheet. Marketing was not able to nurture or track prospects because it wasn’t integrated with sales and because finance wasn’t joined up, invoicing was inconsistent. Furthermore, 40 to 50% of office administration time was lost due to multiple checks across systems. An integrated CRM system solved all these issues.

• Improving data management: a common issue for companies is the disparity of data with it being stored in multiple locations. This can have an impact on duplication of effort, because users have to update data in different places. Or they have to hunt everywhere for specific data. Sound familiar? Well, it was for one of our clients, an insulation business. Its staff were spending too long looking for data in different systems, but CRM ensured all data was stored in one place – this made staff so much more effective, and led to a 10% increase in sales.

A lack of cost optimisation can be seriously detrimental to companies and can impede their growth. Automation, integrated systems and good data management are all sound principles of cost optimisation. And sound principles of CRM too.

If you want to find out how we helped more of our clients improve cost optimisation, please check out our report.