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When you use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for your business, it’s important that you get what you pay for. After all, CRMs do cost money, so you want to be sure yours is driving enough revenue to pay for itself and drive a profit in the process.
That’s why it’s vital to track your CRM’s return on investment (ROI), which is how much money your CRM drives compared to how much it costs. You can evaluate your CRM’s performance by tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), measuring customer engagement, measuring sales and revenue, and comparing CRM costs and benefits.
By doing each of these things, you can accurately assess the best way to optimize your CRM for better performance. Keep reading to learn more about that process.
Track Meaningful CRM KPIs: To accurately measure ROI, B2B teams must track performance indicators like customer engagement, close rates, churn, and deal velocity—then compare these against CRM costs using a clear ROI formula.
CRM ROI Is Often Substantial: When fully adopted, CRMs can return significant value—studies show returns between $8 and $42 for every $1 spent—largely due to improved automation, forecasting, and team productivity.
Sustained ROI Requires Adoption and Iteration: Maximizing CRM ROI depends on strong user adoption, proper training, and regular performance reviews to refine workflows and improve data hygiene.
Tracking key performance indicators—that is, crucial metrics related to your CRM’s performance—is one of the most effective ways to assess your CRM. Some of the best KPIs to track include:
The best way to identify key metrics is to consider your business goals and then look at which metrics best measure those goals. You can track these metrics using different tools, from Google Analytics to customer surveys. Then you can import the data into your CRM and use it to generate reports.
From there, it’s simply a matter of optimizing your CRM based on what you learn.
Learn more:
Another area to measure when determining your overall CRM system ROI is customer engagement. It’s important that your CRM help you maintain high customer engagement because, without it, your customers won’t stay customers for long.
Some of the ways you can measure customer engagement include:
By continuously monitoring each of these things, you can get a good read on how engaged your customers are, helping you optimize any areas where it could be higher.
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Ultimately, the goal of your business comes down to driving sales and revenue. So, you naturally want your CRM to be good at doing that. To evaluate its performance, you’ll want to measure your CRM’s impact on sales and revenue.
Most CRMs make it easy to generate sales reports where you can attribute each sale to the campaigns and CRM workflows that drove it. That means you can identify the areas of your CRM that are less effective at driving sales, allowing you to reoptimize them accordingly.
You can also go beyond sales and assess the impact of your CRM on your marketing campaigns. Even marketing campaigns that aren’t directly run through your CRM still often benefit from the data contained there, so it’s helpful to assess those campaigns, too.
You can then take what you learn and reoptimize your CRM to drive even more sales and revenue for your business.
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Once you’ve sized up the benefits your CRM is driving for your company, be sure to compare those benefits to the CRM’s overall cost. After all, you want to make sure you’re earning back everything you’re paying for your CRM and more. That’s where ROI enters the picture.
To calculate the ROI of your CRM, first determine the net profit generated with your CRM by subtracting its cost from the revenue it helped you bring in. Then, divide your net profit by the cost.
The ROI formula looks like this:
ROI = [(total revenue brought in by CRM – total cost of CRM) / total cost of CRM] x 100
Furthermore, if you work to improve the weak spots you identify in your CRM’s processes, you can continue to make it even better, driving up your ROI even more.
In order to help make your CRM as successful as possible for your business, you should aim to take a comprehensive approach. There are several best practices you can implement to improve your CRM’s effectiveness, including:
It’s especially important that you maintain an ongoing training process for your team members to ensure they’re always up to date on the latest CRM best practices.
Most businesses see initial ROI within 6-12 months of implementation. The first 0-6 months focus on setup and adoption, while 6-18 months bring measurable gains like increased conversions and shorter sales cycles. Full optimization typically occurs after 18+ months with advanced analytics and automation.
User adoption and data quality are the biggest ROI drivers. Research shows time savings from productivity gains account for 51% of total CRM ROI. Other critical factors include proper training, system integrations, clean data management, and alignment between your CRM and actual business processes.
CRM failures typically stem from low user adoption (affecting 50% of implementations), poor training, unclear goals, and overly complex processes. Other common issues include inadequate data quality, lack of executive buy-in, resistance to change, and choosing systems that don’t align with your team’s actual workflows and needs.
Track sales metrics like conversion rates, deal velocity, and sales cycle length. Monitor customer metrics including retention rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), and Net Promoter Score (NPS). Also measure operational efficiency through cost per lead, time saved on manual tasks, and team productivity improvements.
Absolutely. CRM delivers value through time savings (automation reduces manual data entry by 80%), improved customer retention (5% increase can boost profits 25-95%), enhanced team collaboration, better forecasting accuracy (up to 32% improvement), and data-driven decision making. These non-financial benefits often exceed direct revenue gains.
Having a CRM that’s capable of driving leads, sales, and revenue is crucial for the success of your business. That’s why it’s so vital that you take the time to implement the best practices listed above and reoptimize your CRM based on the insights you gain from your analytics.
With a customer-centric approach being so crucial, you need a CRM that’s capable of getting the job done. That’s why Nutshell is such a great option for your business. Not only does it feature data categorization and sales automation capabilities, but it can also generate extensive reports on its own performance.
Not sure if Nutshell is right for you? Just check out our 14-day free trial today!
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