Rebecca Wettemann is Vice President at Nucleus Research

Getting more out of your CRM means giving your sales reps more time to sell. We all know intuitively that extending CRM to the partner network, integrating other data sources, and leveraging technologies for social collaboration will drive greater returns from your system.  The trick is often prioritizing where to start so you're likely to get the greatest bang for your buck.

While many companies have achieved initial returns from their CRM investment, Nucleus Research effort found that 80% of CRM returns have yet to be realized. It turns out that key areas such as integration, extension, and collaboration could account for 50% of remaining CRM returns yet to be achieved.  Some examples of each key area are:

• Integration – integrate front and back office, desktop applications, and social business applications.
• Extension – deploy content and collaboration tools to replace multiple content repositories.
• Collaboration – add social collaboration to CRM.

Increasing your CRM efficiency by the other 30% will come from instrumentation, adding CRM tools and business workflows through technologies like Chatter, and tools that help improve sales management, like incentive compensation and sales talent management. 

You can also use breadth, repeatability, and the other 5 ROI factors to help you prioritize your efforts and identify the areas of greatest untapped return from sales force automation:

To learn more about making the most of your CRM, you can watch the on-demand webinar from Nucleus Research.  We introduce easy-to-follow guidelines for identifying untapped ROI opportunities for CRM in your organization.  Co-speaker, Barb Fraker at Concur, also shares a great case study of what Concur has done to dramatically increase sales effectiveness and ROI within their sales team.