How to Calculate the ROI of Your Salesforce Investment (Part 2 of 2)

Before diving into ROI calculation, it’s essential to clarify the roles of Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Both tools serve distinct, complementary functions, each contributing differently to your financial institution's success. 

Missed part 1? Read it here.

Let’s define how Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Marketing Cloud differ. 

A customer relationship management (CRM) tool is for managing your financial institution’s processes with people. By capturing, managing, and optimizing the data you have on customers (and future customers) you create opportunities, relationships, and transparency. Your Salesforce CRM helps you reach the right audiences. It’s all about good process, good record keeping, and connecting with your customer by capturing insight. Without a well-structured CRM, you’d lack the foundation to reach the right audiences, track interactions, and maintain consistency across teams. 

Think of your CRM like it's the melody in music: It's the foundation, the essential thing. Without it, nothing matters because you can’t do anything. When it’s structured and working well, no one should notice it. What they should notice instead is how well you know them. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud acts as your scale-based marketing engine. It leverages CRM data to deliver personalized, relevant experiences that meet modern consumer expectations. People expect personalization and feeling “known,” and they’ll remember you for it. Marketing Cloud is how you do that at scale. If your Salesforce CRM is the melody, then Marketing Cloud is the lyrics that bring it to life. 

You can also see the difference between a CRM and marketing platforms in the pricing. CRMs are priced per user and/or contact, while marketing platforms don’t have per-person pricing. Marketing Cloud is designed for broader outreach and typically does not charge per contact, making it an effective tool for large-scale, data-driven marketing. When calculating ROI, this distinction matters: CRM costs should reflect the operational benefits, while Marketing Cloud ROI should focus on the revenue uplift from reaching wider audiences and deepening customer engagement. 

Next, let’s look at how most businesses get ROI calculations wrong. 

What we see most is categorizing returns using unclear or very anecdotal information. Bankers feel like they are getting a good return on investment because they’re focused on engagement metrics like email opens, clicks, or website visits as proxies for success. 

The key to accurate ROI calculation lies in understanding where value truly originates. While these activity metrics may look impressive, they don’t necessarily translate into tangible returns. True ROI focuses on measurable business outcomes, such as product conversations that lead to new accounts or engagement that results in concrete actions like mortgage applications. 

How to calculate your returns to drive business decisions. 

Instead, you should be using the tool to see if someone talked about the product and if they took an action.  

• For Salesforce CRM: Look at key metrics like conversion rates, lead generation, customer retention, customer lifetime value, employee productivity, customer satisfaction (NPS and CSAT), and sales cycle efficiency. 

• For Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Focus on marketing-influenced revenue, customer lifetime value (CLV), and campaign-attributed revenue lift, and customer acquisition costs. Consider the reach of campaigns and their effectiveness in driving real customer action, not just clicks or views. 

When used effectively, Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud can transform customer engagement, boost revenue, and streamline operations. By tracking both tangible and intangible benefits, you can ensure that your investment in Salesforce continues to provide value while positioning your financial institution as a modern, customer-centric institution in today’s competitive landscape. 

Photo by Ylanite Koppens