ROI: Three letters that need to be identified to decide any business commitment; three letters that potential clients ask our sales department about all the time; three letters around which we’ve accumulated the following data, to answer those questions…
Leverage your investment in salesforce.com
The listed price for Salesforce is $125 per user each month. Based on the size of your team, whether this translates into a few thousand dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly, the investment can be lofty. One of the reasons our clients purchase Compete, which costs roughly $12 per user each month, is to realize more value from Salesforce. Here are examples of how two of them did just that:
- Comcast spent millions of dollars on salesforce.com, but struggled with a team that rarely used the system at all. Then, upon adding LevelEleven, employee habits changed. Comcast’s salespeople found motivation to track their activities correctly, and Salesforce usage increased significantly. Furthermore, as the system’s data became more accurate, managers obtained better sales activity data to better manage the business.
- One client in the insurance industry had a difficult time collecting accurate opportunity data on close dates and sales stages within salesforce.com. Without such data, managers couldn’t effectively run or forecast the business. So the organization ran a contest to change its team’s behaviors. Here’s what happened: In a matter of days, employees revised thousands of records; in the long run, they prioritized keeping the data up-to-date.
Direct the focus of your sales team
Even an active team needs direction. In fact, most managers that we talk to struggle with directing their sales team’s focus toward key business needs. For example, some have salespeople who meet with existing clients repeatedly and do not prioritize booking appointments with prospective customers. Or maybe it’s just the opposite: A team member aggressively seeks new clients, leaving no time for those already established. Here are some of the ways in which we’ve seen clients adjust a team’s focus in similar cases:
- Comcast designed a contest in hopes of getting salespeople to book more meetings. Its team experienced a 127% spike in the number of appointments set each day.
- When ePrize launched a new product that salespeople weren’t taking to market, management designed a contest around it. Within 30 days, the organization saw a 230% increase in this product’s sales.
- The Detroit Pistons’ salespeople often forgot to pitch a new product, single suite sales. A contest built to remind them drove $500,000 in sales and achieved 50% of the team’s annual single-suite quota in six weeks.
Leveraging Salesforce and directing focus are two of the most popular categories our clients use to describe their ROI. But we do have other information available. If you’d like to learn more about justifying the investment in terms of salesforce.com usage, download our white paper: “Does CRM Adoption Really Matter?” You can also check out our Contest Toolkit for a client case study.
