Introduction
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, effective customer relationship management (CRM) systems have become indispensable tools for companies of all sizes and industries. They help build and maintain strong customer relationships, drive sales growth, and enhance operational efficiency. However, while CRMs offer valuable insights into operational data, they often fall short when it comes to providing management-ready sales reports that executives need to make high-level, strategic decisions. In this blog, we explore the limitations of CRM systems and introduce a solution that goes beyond your CRM’s capabilities to provide powerful, out-of-the-box management-ready sales reports.
Challenges
Executives play a critical role in shaping the strategic direction of a business and making high-level decisions. While CRM systems offer valuable insights and tools, there are certain limitations that executives might encounter when using these systems:
- Lack of Strategic Insights: CRM systems excel at providing detailed operational data, but they often miss the mark when it comes to offering the strategic insights executives require to make informed, big-picture decisions. Understanding market trends, assessing the competitive landscape, and identifying long-term growth opportunities can be challenging with CRM data alone.
- Data Interpretation Challenges: The vast amount of data generated by CRM systems can be overwhelming for executives who are not directly involved in daily operations. Extracting meaningful insights from this data and translating them into actionable strategies can be a daunting task.
- Short-Term Metric Focus: Many CRM systems emphasize short-term metrics, such as lead generation, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs. While these metrics are important, executives need to balance them with a longer-term perspective, including customer lifetime value, loyalty, and brand reputation.
- Limitations in analytics:
- Limited Historical Data: CRMs lack historical data, making it challenging to calculate key performance indicators (KPIs) that compare different time points, like net revenue retention, with high effort and risk of errors.
- Data Integration Complexity: KPI calculations from various data sources, e.g., project profitability, require a common data schema not typically available at the spreadsheet level.
- Complex Visualizations: Creating advanced visualizations resembling those used by top management consultants, like cohort analysis charts, demands time and manual effort, even if the chart type is available.
- AI Forecasting Requirements: Reliable AI-based forecasts necessitate highly granular data, including detailed time series data at the hourly level, which CRM systems may lack.
- Getting lost in Detail: Executives often require high-level data summaries without diving into operational details, posing a challenge in customizing CRM systems to provide such summaries effectively.
Figure 1: CRM limitations
The Solution: ValueWorks
ValueWorks is a game-changing solution that complements your CRM system by providing a flexible, scalable, and integrated data storage and analytics platform. It empowers businesses to extract deeper insights from their CRM data, support advanced analytics, and adapt to evolving CRM and data requirements.
Figure 2: The role of the data lake house
Key use questions ValueWorks can cover out-of-the-box
There are several use-cases that ValueWorks can cover using its industry-specific approach with a modern data infrastructure beneath.
To make it concrete, are three key topics that ValueWorks can deliver out-of-the-box:
To make it concrete, are three key topics that ValueWorks can deliver out-of-the-box:
1. Net Revenue Retention: Maximizing Customer Growth
Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is a critical metric that measures the growth and retention of revenue from existing customers over a specific period. It provides insights into the health and effectiveness of your customer base management and the impact of upsells, cross-sells, expansions, and churn. A NRR percentage above 100% signifies revenue growth, while a percentage below 100% indicates revenue contraction. ValueWorks provides the tools to calculate and leverage NRR effectively.
Figure 3: Net Revenue Retention
2. Conversion Rate Optimization: Fine-Tuning Your Sales Funnel
Conversion rates within your sales funnel are vital for measuring the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts. ValueWorks allows you to identify bottlenecks, nurture leads, and make accurate revenue projections based on conversion rates. By providing insights into where potential customers drop out of your funnel, you can improve your sales process and drive more conversions.
Conversion Rate = (Number of Conversions / Number of Leads at the previous Stage) * 100
Figure 4: Conversion matrix
3. Slipped Deals Management: Reducing Revenue Loss
“Slipped deals”, or deals that get delayed, can impact both short-term and long-term revenue. ValueWorks offers strategies to reduce the number of slipped deals, including effective qualification, clear timeline expectations, and engagement with decision-makers. By addressing budget concerns and implementing a structured follow-up strategy, you can minimize revenue loss and maximize revenue-generating opportunities.
Figure 5: Slipped deals
Summary & Outlook
While CRM systems serve a critical role in daily operations, their limitations in providing management-ready sales reports can hinder executive decision-making. ValueWorks steps in to bridge the gap by offering a comprehensive solution for extracting deeper insights, optimizing conversion rates, and managing slipped deals effectively. The platform empowers executives to make data-driven, high-level decisions and positions companies for long-term growth and success.
In today’s competitive business environment, having the right tools and insights at your fingertips can be the difference between success and stagnation. Get the power of ValueWorks and unlock the full potential of your CRM data to drive your business forward.
Whitepaper: Management-ready sales reports out-of-the-box you can not get from your CRM
Why you need ValueWorks as an add-on to your CRM system to perform crucial management analysis
