How Can CFOs And CEOs Reduce CRM Spend With AI?

CRM and Sales tool spending is one of the top CFO concerns in most B2B companies

Running a B2B SaaS business can be challenging, especially when it comes to managing expenses. One of the biggest expenses for such businesses is customer relationship management (CRM). 

Per a recent survey by FinancesOnline in 2023 it has been found that 52% of finance decision-makers consider CRM software to be a significant expense. With 70% of Boards of Directors looking to accelerate digital business initiatives and strategies, CFOs play a pivotal role in steering their business to digitally-enabled growth. 

In addition, CFOs face the challenge of managing increased margin pressures as we pivot to an economy from growth at all costs to growth with efficiency.

With the ever-changing market, monitoring and reducing CRM spending is critical for businesses and CFOs to optimize finances to extend company runway and drive growth. 

To help businesses overcome this challenge, Aviso AI has developed a unique way of beating the CRM spend curve. In this blog post, we will dive deep into how we got here in the first place with CRM, the non-trivial challenges of CRM spend reduction, and how AI platforms like Aviso can help you monitor and reduce your CRM spending, while still achieving your business goals.

Too many vendor options fueling CRM spending surge while CRM ROI is lower than ever   

With a plethora of CRM systems available in the market today (G2 Marketplace reports 839 CRMs as of April 2023, a number that has increased on average by 100 CRMs per year), businesses continue to invest on these systems due to the perception that more features and functionalities would maximize their sales and customer engagement.

However, overspending on CRM systems is not a financially sound decision, especially for startups and small businesses. Let's investigate why

Lowest adoption tool within tools

CRM systems generally have a lower degree of user adoption as compared to other specialized tools. This is driven by the fact that essentially a CRM platform is expected to serve a lot of different objectives (data warehouse, customer 360 engagement, account transaction channel, etc.) and its success is heavily dependent on its user adoption from a variety of user personas. 

Therefore CRM platform user adoption is more challenging and is lower as compared to other more sophisticated tools serving a relatively more targeted purpose and hence businesses are not able to extract appropriate value out of it at the amount they are putting into it. 

Reps hate CRM

A blunt sales rep will most likely tell you that they generally don’t like to follow CRM guided selling and prefer to engage with their customers on their own. 

Most CRMs promise a 360 degree view of customers for reps but in reality do not have the sophistication of providing smart insights and steps for reps that supplements their account intelligence rather than challenging it.  

Data is Bad, Stale, Disconnected From Reality

A CRM platform is like a customer profile doormat that is on one hand intended to keep the customer engagement processes cleaner but turns out getting dirtier over time with faulty, stale and obsolete data and technical debt that is very difficult to remove. It is only as clean as the data and historical records that it holds, so there is a huge dependency and challenge to maintain data hygiene in business IT operations. 

CRM spending is not a trivial matter anymore and needs serious attention 

It is clear that CRM has become a necessary evil, and while it is a great source for business continuity, it is not a great source for business intelligence and growth.

To start with any financial consolidation of CRM, it's essential to continually monitor CRM spending and identify areas where cost cuts can be made without affecting your business operations.

There are a few ways to accomplish this - 

1. One way to reduce CRM spending is by evaluating the features and functionalities of your current CRM system to ascertain which of them are essential for your business operations. You can cut out CRM e.g. cut down on extra Add Ons, Storage, Security costs. 
2. Second way - You can then consider switching to a more cost-effective CRM system that meets your business requirements without breaking the bank. Eg. SFDC to Pipedrive, problem is you can lose a lot of essential functionality and also if you move away from the salesforce ecosystem you lose out on much of the associated public coverage that you get with salesforce.  
3. The third and the most change management friendly option is reviewing the number of users licensed to use the system, especially if some of those users aren't utilizing the system regularly. 
4. Reducing the number of users can help cut down on subscription costs and ensure that only active users are part of the system, thus maximizing productivity.
5. Give those non essential business users a way for them to see and use only the functionality that they need at a much lower price point than their current license.  

Aviso AI’s unique way for bending the CRM spend curve

Aviso will help you bend the CRM spend curve by plugging into the current CRM processes and figuring out which are core and which importantly are non essential to the core workings of your business. 

How?

• Time series database - CRM + Snapshots across millions of behaviors
• Plug and play multiple sources - A Signal Capture Engine that ‘sees’, ‘remembers’ and ‘interprets’ data from every CRM and non-CRM system of record.
• Deal collaboration rooms - Slack, but with Intelligence. Bring all stakeholders from the buyer and seller sides together in a single space to close deals faster

This gives you a chance to eliminate non-essential CRM licenses without any hiccups to your data while avoiding data integrity issues during the transition. 

What this essentially means is that bringing Aviso into your revenue operations enables you to relook at your CRM contract and swap out non essential CRM users with Aviso non core platform user licenses at no switching cost and moreover ensuring a significant reduction in your CRM total contract value (TCV). 

Undergoing this unique analysis Aviso customers have seen potentially 40-45% non essential users on their CRM login volume where majority users login less than 3x per year. 

The impact of taking them out is close to a 25-30% reduction on their spending on those CRM licenses. 

Gaining upside of CRM savings while driving effective change management

These benefits coupled with the easy onboarding and change management transition provided by Aviso (which on average takes less than a month subject to the complexities involved) is what separates Aviso AI from the rest of the playing field.

What do you get when you sign on with Aviso? 

More importantly than anything else you get a partner to share your strategic vision and help you drive growth in both the near and far terms, But apart from that obvious fact also during your transition and onboarding you get the following propositions that set Aviso customer transitions apart from other players in the space. 

A Detailed process mapping 

During Aviso’s transition process, you get a highly sophisticated approach to review your current CRM and RevOps technical and business architecture and an assessment of your revenue pipeline to factor in necessary steps to make the journey into Aviso as smooth as possible.

A Dedicated SE and CSM 

With Aviso, you get a dedicated Aviso Solution Expert and a dedicated Aviso Customer Success Manager, the moment you begin your contract cycle with the platform. So this makes your change management transition to Aviso an easy process that is not a burden on the users. 

A recent customer testimonial quotes Aviso’s change management process to the extent of as the “smoothest onboarding experience ever”.

Conclusion

In summary, monitoring and reducing CRM spending is crucial for businesses in the current B2B SaaS market. 

With the help of Aviso AI, you can keep a close eye on your CRM spending and make the necessary changes to improve financial sustainability for your business. Their revolutionary approach to “bending” the CRM spend curve is truly unique and can help businesses of any size to save money while still achieving their sales goals.

By using Aviso AI to monitor your CRM spending, you can be confident that your business will remain financially stable and successful for years to come.

Learn more about Aviso and how our unique platform can help you maximize CRM ROI.