Whenever you make an investment, the primary intention is to get the best return on the same. ROI always plays an important role in an individual or organization spending their money on acquiring products or services. Whether you are creating a marketing campaign, hiring new employees, launching a new line of products, or expanding your business, it is important to calculate ROI for the same.

Calculating ROI allows you to quantify the success or failure of your investment. It helps the management draw valuable insights out of the money spent and the results obtained. Also, calculating ROI allows the management to make important decisions in the interest of the business. If you are successful in generating a positive ROI, you need to reinforce your processes and work on them to further improve the returns. On the other hand, if you are not able to obtain the desired ROI, it is important to look back on the strategy and make necessary amendments to the same.

Salesforce ROI

Salesforce is not an inexpensive CRM platform. Organizations across the world spend a sufficient amount of money to implement Salesforce and its products. Starting from $25/user/month, a business may have to pay up to $300/user/month for different Salesforce offerings. Especially in the case of small to medium enterprises, this is a handsome investment.

This makes it important for organizations to calculate Salesforce ROI in order to determine how successful their investment in Salesforce was. Salesforce ROI is not always determined in monetary terms. There are different factors that come into play while deciding the same, such as user adoption, customer satisfaction, risk management, and many more.

Salesforce ROI can be determined over specific periods of time and needs to be monitored regularly to keep a track of the money spent behind the same. Essentially being a customer relationship management platform, businesses would also want the platform to help them cater to their customers and bring home the desired revenue.

Moreover, the calculation of Salesforce ROI needs to be refined. This is because the returns and increase in sales are likely to be caused by a number of factors apart from Salesforce itself, including:

• New sales reps
• New marketing professionals
• A profitable merger
• Launch of new products
• A change in the price of offerings
• New investments in the field of sales and marketing
• New investments made in fields other than Salesforce

This makes it important for an organization to be precise and vigilant in calculating the ROI generated from using Salesforce.

The ideal way to calculate Salesforce ROI is to determine the impact every major Salesforce initiative has had on an increase in the revenue generated by the organization. You can define this increase as a percentage to quantify the returns. Let’s understand this with the help of an example.

Let’s say implementing Salesforce within your organization impacted your revenue by 25%. If so, multiply the 25% by an increase by the increase in your sales made with the help of Salesforce over a specific period of time. Multiply this by the gross profit percentage, and divide the result by the total cost of implementing Salesforce.

If you are willing to simplify the process, you can take the aggregate of the cost reductions carried out for a specific period pertaining to Salesforce process improvements. From this figure, deduct the total cost of implementing the platform (which includes the administration costs and Salesforce partners) for the same period of time.

In both cases, make sure that the chosen time period is long enough to draw valuable conclusions.

Important Vectors For Measuring The Impact Of Salesforce Implementation

In order to measure the opportunities of optimizing the value of Salesforce investment and the impact of the same, there are three major vectors that impact the implementation of your Salesforce application – the impact on revenue, impact on customer experience, and impact on risk management. Assessing these three vectors would help you ascertain how successful your Salesforce implementation was.

Impact On Revenue

This is one of the biggest vectors to consider when it comes to measuring your Salesforce ROI as the primary purpose of the CRM platform is to drive home more revenue. Here, you need to take into consideration aspects like the gross revenue earned over a period of time, the improvement in the profit margin (if any), and the decrease in the operational cost. This would help you understand how successful Salesforce implementation was in terms of generating revenue.

Impact On Customer Experience

Another important vector is the impact Salesforce has on the experience of your customers. Salesforce is a customer relationship platform and should be used to build healthy and lasting relationships with customers. Here, you can take into consideration the improvement in the net promoter score (NPS), increase in the customer share of wallet, and decrease in customer attrition. This assessment would help you ascertain how successful Salesforce implementation was for improving your relationship with your customers.

This vector can also be considered with respect to the partners you work with. Just like customers. Salesforce is also used for strengthening relationships with an organization’s business partners. If you are able to establish and leverage ties with your partners, you can say that your Salesforce implementation was successful.

Impact On Risk Management

No investment is carried out without a certain amount of risk involved in the same. An important advantage of Salesforce implementation is the fact that it helps you reduce the number of risks involved in undertaking transactions. If your Salesforce investment is successful in helping you reduce the high-risk areas and tolerance scores, your return on the investment can be considered positive.

How To Increase Your Salesforce ROI

Now that we are well-versed with what Salesforce ROI stands for and the factors affecting the same, let’s understand the different ways of increasing the Salesforce ROI for your organization:

Build A Strong Foundation

If you have built a strong foundation with respect to Salesforce development and implementation, you are more likely to get a positive return on your investment. Always make sure that your developers remove dead codes such as unused classes, methods, and lines of codes. If the code is precise and clean, it would not hamper the processes undertaken by the CRM platform.

Moreover, it is important to optimize the development code in alignment with your Salesforce processes. Make sure you clean up all your fields, profiles, rules, screens, and all other aspects pertaining to building a robust Salesforce application.

If you are willing to build a strong foundation, it is advisable to automate future quality validation and control. This would help you ensure the ongoing hygiene of the platform, reducing the risks you may face along the way.

Be Vigilant In Stitching The Processes

Once you have built a strong foundation, it is advisable to integrate and connect different processes. This enables improved decision-making and gets rid of the unwanted cycle-time pertaining to cross-functional hand-offs.

Developers can undertake tight marketing integration and refine the marketing tollgates and hand-off akin. They can also ensure close integration of the quote-to-cash processes for seamless process flow. Moreover, it is important to undertake a tight integration with customer engagement systems like field service or eCommerce facilities to improve the processes undertaken by the users.

While stitching the processes, always make sure to focus on process automation to reduce manual churn.

Go For Touchless Or Low-touch Sales And Services

One of the key purposes of implementing Salesforce is to help the users reduce time and effort in undertaking sales and service processes. While fulfilling service requests, a considerable amount of effort involves in undertaking unnecessary churn that should be eliminated (or automated) for making the sales and/or service cycle self-managed.

In order to fulfill these requirements, it is advisable to bring in a consumer experience in the business buying cycle with the help of suitable eCommerce tools, streamlined customer profiling, and segmentation. It is also advisable to build the ability to quickly change one engagement channel from low-touch to high-touch for minimizing churn.

Optimize User Adoption

Finally, it is important to make the most of user adoption in order to increase your Salesforce ROI. Salesforce may not be an easy platform to work on for users that are switching from a different CRM platform. If you are successful in helping the users get well-versed with its tools and features, they would optimize your processes and help you get the desired traction.

The entire functionality of Salesforce depends on the ability of its users. Once they get a hang of the CRM platform, they can use it to provide you with the ROI you desire. This allows you to grow your organization and provide better services to your customers.

The Final Word

These were some of the ways in which you can calculate and leverage your Salesforce ROI. Irrespective of the scale at which you operate and the industry you belong to, it is important to obtain a decent ROI for Salesforce implementation to optimize the platform.