How to make a compelling business case for Customer Relationship Management

CRM tools offer new options and opportunities. It is now possible to customise products, prices,
promotion and even place for each individual customer on a profitable basis. Competing means you
have to have a customer-focussed vision as well as a product focussed one.

But which are the right CRM strategies and systems? Making sure that managers channel their energies into the right projects is the most formidable and important task in business today.
The aim of this briefing is to help you to undertake a systematic analysis of your need for CRM and build a strong business case. The result: a disciplined and thoughtful analysis that will satisfy both the team and the senior managers who have to support the effort.

If you had a £25m piece of equipment in your factory, you wouldn’t think twice about paying 5% p.a. to keep it finely tuned, yet companies argue for weeks about spending a few pounds to keep a £25m sales team selling.
Robert Boylan, Results Now Inc.

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Key points

1. Whilst many CRM strategies are based on the theory of increasing customer retention through
improved satisfaction, it is a myth that all customers want and are prepared to pay for informationintensive ‘personal’ relationships.

2. Calculations of CRM systems ROI are particularly difficult for three reasons:

• there is no baseline data prior to the use of the system, making before and after comparisons impossible
  
• there are too many other independent variables many benefits are soft or intangible and hard to quantify

But recent CRM projects are yielding an immediate increase of 8% in revenues, and a target growth of
16% within two years.

3. Benefits to customers from CRM systems include:

• improved response time to customer requests for information
• delivered product meets customer requirements
• reduced costs of buying the product/service
• reduced costs of using the product/service
• immediate access to order status
• greater breadth of solution options
• more responsive technical support.

In conclusion:

CRM tools offer new options and opportunities. If you do not take advantage of them, rest assured the competition will.

But which are the right CRM strategies and systems? Making sure that managers channel their energies into the right projects is the most formidable and important task in business today.

Building a compelling business case for CRM systems is much more than a dry ROI. It means choosing both the right customer-focussed strategies and the right CRM systems. And once you’ve got it right, you need to demonstrate and build support for the resources and changes needed for your project to succeed.

Some final words of advice:

• learn from others. Get advice and guidance outside of that offered by vendors and system integrators
• political and cultural issues are the hot points to monitor. Remember to sell early and sell often; create benefits for everyone.

“The plan is nothing, planning is everything”
Dwight D. Eisenhower

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