Integrating Rewards into Customer Relationship Management

Given their superpowers of organizing and accelerating business outcomes, implementing a CRM is often its reward. And while your teams will agree with the spirit of the expression, you can’t blame them for wanting to be rewarded a little more ‘tangibly’ for little and big wins along the loop. Integrating rewards into your CRM workflows helps you scale another important peak: Systematically eliminating system flaws and sustainably amping up business outcomes. Nothing, after all, makes a team more efficient like the promise of an incentive.

Innovations in the digital rewards space - such as Xoxoday’s Plum - integrate with modern-day CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot, Freshworks and others) precisely with this goal in mind. They make it easy, sensible and profitable to incentivize and recognize your CRM teams - in real-time, without wait time. Result? You get to build more optimized CRM ecosystems, engineer better results and pump up the winning tempo - one memorable and personalized reward at a time.

All you, as the leader, need to do is stay creative and not miss any opportunity to catch your rock stars when they are shining their brightest. And it all begins by designing your CRM frameworks around the correct KPIs so that the impact of rewards can be maximized.‍

A Key Element of Customer Relationship Management is to

1. Set Smart Goals

Start out facing the right direction, and half the job is done. Set out, therefore, making sure that the reward-worthy CRM goals you have designed for your business are SMART: In other words, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely. Step two: Bucket your big KPIs in clearly segregated groups. This will vary depending upon your business and sales objectives, but broadly speaking, the common ones are :

2. Close Rate

This refers to the percentage of leads that have been taken to their successful conclusion vis-as-vis the total number of leads you have in your pipeline. As you calculate this figure, make sure to factor in the quality of leads you are closing - be it in terms of ticket size, prestige/stature of the client, future impact or something else that makes sense for your business.

3. Upsell & Cross-Sell

Are your teams easily satisfied with ticking off-targets, or do they frequently go beyond and add higher upgrades and stretch horizontally to cross-sell across categories? Design a CRM workflow that encourages the latter.

4. Pipeline Gestation

How bad (or good) is the traffic at each lane and cross-road of your customer journey? In other words, for how long are your leads normally ‘stuck’ in each phase? Tracking these will help you weed out bottlenecks and move onto subsequent phases quicker.

5. Lead Velocity

Sound sciency? Well, this one maps to the length of your lead cycle, and how quickly (or slowly) teams are closing deals. A shorter cycle (or higher velocity) doesn’t just bring in more revenue faster but brings down ‘cost per acquisition’ too.

6. Customer Lifetime Value

Divide the total value/revenue generated by a customer, which will feature purchase frequency somewhere, by the total timespan (quantum of time) over which the customer is active.

7. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Simply put, Customer Acquisition Cost is the total cost or spend - from both marketing and sales coffers - that you have incurred to acquire a customer.

8. Campaign Value

You are running a million costs marketing campaigns - across various channels and platforms such as emails paid ads and influencer interventions - right through your funnels. How is each faring? Nothing’s more important to monitor and measure.

9. Subscriber Rate

Not all kinds of ‘attachment’ will convert into a sale outright. Nurturing them properly, however, can still reap you rich dividends, especially over the long term - be it via a late conversion, referrals or great reviews/word-of-mouth on social. So whether it is emails, opt-in newsletters, blogs or social media followership, keep a close tab on the rate at which you are gaining product cheerleaders and brand ambassadors.

10. Loyalty & Churn

It’s not just about winning new accounts, is it? Often, it’s far more profitable - in every sense - to be able to retain your existing ones. The reverse - churn, or the rate at which customers are dropping off - is equally important to analyse, to figure out where you are going wrong.

Start with the Usual Suspects

While your recce will unearth a smorgasbord of metrics and activities that are specific to your organizational dynamic, you are likely to also land the gang of usual suspects and common culprits are that are familiar faces across the industry (and chances are have been bugging your competitors too). Some of them are the inability to successfully decode buyer persona and intent, not making accurate priority buckets for customers (VIP, High Value, Bread-and-Butter, small ticket, etc), staying clueless about how to create content that compels and builds a high-quality lead pipeline, UX designers with a missing right brain, a personalized follow-up plan that is conspicuous by its absence, deals & offers that target the wrong emotion-buttons and hence fail to elicit a response, sluggish follow-ups and grievance-resolution, not using the right CRM reports and therefore getting the wrong picture, and so on. Each, is a golden opportunity to redo, reward and repeat.

Redo. Reward. Repeat.

Take a closer look at these KPIs, and along with the gaps and bottlenecks, you’ll notice something else, something precious. Windows of improvement. Room for betterment. Opportunity to grow. And with it, a delightful bonus. A shot at engaging your teams and aligning your rockstars robustly, with the incentive of rewards. Go back to the list and study the lacunae carefully again. Map them to the activities and roles that are responsible - directly or indirectly - for making them see the light of day. Follow it up by defining fresh workflows and designing incentive rules based on various milestones in the funnel. Finally, deploy an ‘Accolade Framework’ that recognizes every action and behaviour that delivers a delta of corrective impact - and rewards in real-time: Making sure credit is not just given where it’s due, but the moment it is due. Adequately, seamlessly and with zero wait time.

Add the Difference of 'Real-Time Rewarding' into your CRM with Xoxoday.

For talent leaders, Xoxoday - the digital way to applaud contribution and salute achievers instantly and memorably – represents an endless, unforgettable and completely customizable universe of rewards such as gift cards, branded currencies, perks, discounts, merchandise, utilities, indulgences, luxuries, bespoke catalogs and personalized experiences.

That's not All.

Plum is easy to implement, integrating effortlessly with your current technologies and systems like CRM, HRMS, PRM, Surveys and more. And apart from breezy customizability and deep personalizability, Plum’s omnichannel nature makes it compatible with any delivery medium your systems are comfortable with, such as On-Screen, SMS, Email, Whatsapp, QR Codes, Notifications and several others. Finally, Plum’s data-rich reports and analytics bring you never-before visibility and insights into every aspect of your incentive eco-system (usage patterns, spending patterns, ROI) so that you can keep optimizing and improving it.