At the heart of a firm’s CRM strategy is the desire to better understand and relate to one’s client base and improve the management of ongoing prospect, customer, and partner interactions. A top-tier CRM system offers historical analysis capabilities that provide firms with not only a superior comprehension of past client behavior, but also a strong foundation for tracking employee performance and predicting future client demands and overall market trends.
Though all firms wish to report on client and employee performance data that they work so hard to accumulate, many are unable to do so in a timely manner, often due to disconnected proprietary or legacy applications, rampant decentralized client data, walled off departments, or just the lack of a powerful reporting engine.
Fortunately, CRM makes this dream a reality!
Below, I have listed a sampling of performance measurement questions that firms leveraging a leading-edge CRM system with a robust Marketing, Sales, and Service suite can quickly answer and then share with their peers or report on.
Marketing
- What are our campaign response rates and are we touching enough prospects?
- What is the success rate of our campaigns and how many customers are they converting?
- What products are our customers buying as a result of the campaign?
- What are our customer acquisition costs and overall marketing spend?
- How often and why do our customers terminate their relationship by opting out or choosing to go with another competitor?
- What is our average wallet share with each customer?
- What is the average order size per customer?
- How many people visit our website every day?
- How long was the visitor on our website and where was she clicking?
- What banner ads are visitors clicking before they visit our website?
Sales
- How much revenue has been brought in MTD, QTD, and YTD?
- Where are we at against our monthly, quarterly, annual, and YOY goals?
- How does the short-term and long-term pipeline look?
- What is our average deal size and sales cycle?
- How many new customers have been added during the last month, quarter, or year?
- How many outbound calls or appointments do our Sales Reps make each week?
- What are the cross-sell rates of our Sales Team?
- Who represents our most profitable customers?
- Who are our most profitable and most frequent lead sources?
- What are our primary reasons for losing deals?
- Which competitors are constantly stealing business from us?
Customer Service
- How many backorders do we currently have?
- What is the average time it takes to fill a customer order?
- What percentage of our orders is shipped out on time?
- How many inbound calls are received by our call center agents?
- What is the average talk time per call?
- What is the primary topic/issue of the call?
- How often are issues resolved on the first call?
- What are the average hold times for a customer?
- How many of our inbound calls are abandoned?
- What is the average time a customer waits before the call is abandoned?
All of the questions above can be answered with the help of CRM. Plus, the applicable KPI
metrics can even be charted in real-time dashboards and charts to inform and accelerate decision-making, identify gaps and recurring trends, and augment the coaching of direct reports and teams.
If your organization is struggling with defining and tracking any of the CRM metrics above, then it is time for a CRM project readiness evaluation.
What are your favorite CRM KPIs? What other KPIs besides the above do you rigorously track to gauge your progress and achieve your goals? Please leave a comment below.
