Have you been lately trying to finalize a CRM software for your team but unable to figure out how much should you be spending for CRM?
As Businesses differ in size and type of deal value they deal in, It is complex for you to figure out the exact numeric estimate of how much of your allocated budget you must spend for taking up a CRM. Market is filled with CRM which charges from 9 USD per month per user to 500 USD per month per user based on the feature complexity of the Software and Value add provided by the service as per the needs of the Sales Team.
The answer is difficult and complex!
But Let us try to find a simple solution to it.
Get an Estimate of Cost incurred by Sales Executive doing Non-revenue generating task:
- Get an estimated figure of the amount you spend paying your Sales Executive's Annual Salary.
- With that, try to find your hourly cost rate of your executives.
- Guess the average amount of time each Sales team member spends in a day doing manual entry of his sales figures into an Excel file to be shared to his Manager or to Reporting analyst who will consolidate it further for the whole team. This could be roughly around 30 minutes a day out of 8 working hours of the resource.
- Guess the average amount of time each Sales team member spends in a day trying to search or recall or figure out some of the past conversation history with some Client documented in some random email or document which is important for his follow up call. This could again be roughly around 30 minutes to 1 hour per day.
- Sum up both the time.
Get an Estimate of Cost incurred by Reporting Analysts doing Non-revenue generating tasks:
- Sales Reporting Analysts doing the task of Reporting and Measurement Analyst is redundant and detrimental for their career. Most of the time these resources are over burdened with the dirty work of following up with each sales executive and getting the sales figures, plugging it in spreadsheet application and drawing pivot tables, bar charts, pie charts, line chart etc and prepare a dashboard for the Senior Management.
- By the time Analysts complete this task for a particular week, the next week very soon arrives and his task keeps repeating week over week without an end. This is unproductive since Sales Analysts should be spending time trying to get important insights from Sales numbers which can help them beat revenue targets instead of trying to become a data gathering guy of the Sales Team.
- Now get an estimated figure of the Salary you pay to your Sales Reporting Analyst annually.
- Note: Do this step only if your team's sales analyst is involved with the above non-revenue generating activities. If your Sales Analyst is involved with other productive work, you may skip this step, or try to find the hours spent by him doing these non-productive tasks and get estimated Salary getting spend on that part.
Get the Total Estimate:
Total Yearly CRM Budget = (Annual Salary of Sales Executive * (Total Time Spent per day doing Unproductive work/ 8 hours per day) * Total Number of Sales Executives in team) + (Annual Salary of Reporting Analysts * Total Number of Reporting Analysts in your team)
The above amount would be the yearly estimate of how much should you be spending on your CRM which is going waste in the Salary of resources doing non-revenue generating tasks.
How much should you be spending monthly per sales staff?
CRM Budget per User per Month = Total Yearly CRM Budget / (12 Months * Total Number of Sales Executives)
This figure would give you a rough estimate of how much should you be ideally spending per team member on a CRM.
Let me know your thoughts on this.
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