Assessment can help with CRM features and customizations

Here’s a money-saving tip: Before you upgrade your CRM, make sure you’re getting the full benefit from the tools you have. You may be able to increase ROI without spending time or money on customizations or new apps.

You can work with a consultant or an in-house administrator to evaluate your CRM performance. From our experience, there are seven areas where CRM users typically “leave money on the table including:

1. Low adoption: Chances are, CRM adoption isn’t 100%. New bells and whistles don’t matter if they aren’t used. To start, quantify adoption rates and identify the reasons buy-in is missing. From there, you can create a plan to increase adoption. Maybe CRM training is insufficient during onboarding, or it needs to be featured in advanced training and professional development strategies.
2. Data cleanliness: You need clean and reliable data to make good, data-driven decisions. But how often do you check your data for cleanliness? Assess the cleanliness of your data and create a plan to regularly maintain data hygiene. Reports and CRM capabilities are more valuable when they're built clean data.
3. Change requests: Change is normal, and so are change requests. But if you don’t have a plan to manage them, you could create workflows that are too complex. Develop a process to review and ranks change requests, and to cascade changes across the organization. A CRM should bring the organization and its data together, not create fragments and silos.
4. Ownership: Who owns the longer-term plan for the CRM? And who decides when it’s time for an upgrade, and how to enhance it? Users need to have a voice in the conversation. Your CRM also needs a champion who understands its full potential and can create a roadmap to maximize ROI.  
5. Training: When staff become comfortable and more experienced with a CRM, it’s time to enhance their training. Salesforce offers advanced training and accreditation programs to turn people into power users. Training communities, like at Salesforce, can also bring new ideas into the organization.
6. Customer experience: About 80% of customers consider their experience with a company to be as important as its products. Is your CRM mapped to match the entire customer journey? A CRM assessment can help you find gaps, sync marketing and sales efforts, and create more personalized customer experiences.
7. Integration: You know it’s true: Having a single source of data is the best way to ensure accuracy and increase efficiency. But do you practice what you preach? Assess your CRM and data management processes. You want data from multiple sources to converge and integrate in the CRM. If you’re missing data, you could be missing opportunities or degrading decision making.

Sometimes it’s hard to assess your own performance. Wipfli takes the time to learn your business and offers an professional, outside point of view. Together, we can assess your CRM utilization and fine-tune performance. We want you to get the most value out of Salesforce (or your CRM of choice) before you increase your investment.  Learn more on our CRM services web page.