CRM: A Business Imperative for Companies during the Global Economic Downturn

Great whitepaper from SalesLogix.  Even better, it is not product specific, it focuses on a few core concepts,  like:

The Cost of Doing Nothing –

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  A sales executive spends six weeks closing a $50,000 opportunity with a new customer rather than spending two weeks closing a similar opportunity with an existing customer [$100,000 opportunity cost]


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  A sales executive with a base salary of $80,000 per year spends 10 hours per week on sales administration [$20,000 direct salary cost per year]


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  A sales executive focuses exclusively on a large but poorly-qualified opportunity worth $500,000 rather than pursuing three, well-qualified deals worth $60,000 each [$180,000 opportunity cost]


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  At a company with 400 customers on $10,000 per year service contracts, a 30% increase in call queuing time translates into a 15% increase in non-renewal of service contracts the following year [$600,000 in lost revenues]


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  At a company, 25% of customer support requests; equating to two FTEs earning $25,000 each per year, could be handled on a self-service basis over the Web [$50,000 direct salary cost]


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  At a company where an average deal is worth $35,000 and the sales team closes one-in-five leads, lower than anticipated demand generated by traditional marketing activities translates into a 30% net decrease in inbound sales enquiries from 80 per month to only 56 [$2.02m in lost revenues over the year]

Also covered are Undelying Issues and How CRM Can Help.  This is one of the better papers SalesLogix has produced.  Download below.