Sales in the Current Economic Climate: Why CRM and Data Quality Matter Now

These figures are repeatedly surprising—and in times of crisis they are even more striking than in boom periods, because the companies you want to win as new customers are also unsettled and have to cut costs everywhere.

In the past, people used to say that the effort required to acquire a new customer was three times higher than the effort needed to retain an existing one.

A few years ago, analyses even showed a tenfold effort for new-customer acquisition, because the constant availability of information and pricing has significantly changed the role of salespeople.

To win a new customer today, you need a great deal of expertise and deep insight into the prospect’s processes and pricing. This is where “consultative selling” comes in—and an employee with that level of expertise naturally costs more than someone who simply runs a cold-calling program.

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/growth-amid-uncertainty-jump-starting-b2b-sales-performance

Increase revenue from existing customers through cross-selling and upselling

McKinsey recommends analyzing existing customer relationships in detail to determine whether the customer already has the optimal product, the optimal level of service, and a fair price.

All three factors are often levers for increasing revenue.

In long-standing customer relationships, it is often not even fully known which services the logistics provider has in its portfolio.

A strong sales scenario, therefore, is to use best-practice examples to demonstrate how other customers benefit from the right mix of services and products.

Modern CRMs include AI agents that analyze the customer’s current setup and propose additional products, price adjustments, or upsell opportunities.

Benchmarking against similarly operating customers can be helpful here.

The prerequisite, of course, is that the CRM has transparent access—via the ERP—to services and revenue performance per product.

Use AI to identify suitable leads

In the past, a major part of sales work involved research: identifying and analyzing suitable leads and finding the right contact person.

Today, AI can do this remarkably well and provide strong suggestions.

Ideally, there is an AI agent integrated into the CRM that, for example, proposes a pitch already tailored to the customer profile—or that handles research on relevant contacts and recommends who a salesperson should approach, and on which topic.

How can modern CRM motivate employees to share their information

Digitizing customer knowledge and making it available for AI tools

Allocate ample staff resources to support high-potential deals

This scenario is particularly interesting: once analysis has identified the most profitable customers and a risk analysis has clarified where customer satisfaction could deteriorate significantly, staff should be deployed very selectively here.

For example, in contract logistics, this could mean placing a special focus on data quality and fulfillment performance and assigning qualified staff to manage operations. Or it could mean tasking the account manager with monitoring all complaints and fluctuations in orders—and engaging quickly if something is not working.

For this, it is crucial that all data—including customer complaints, claims, damages, and service calls—is transparent to the account manager, and that there are proactive alerts for shipment fluctuations, credit limit overruns, missed payments, etc.

A well-integrated CRM contains all of this data and can trigger proactive alerts via monitoring processes.

Identify price outliers among existing customers and move toward standard pricing

This lever may seem surprising at first. But especially in logistics, prices consist of many components, and it is often possible to increase contribution margin significantly through certain components.

Another common scenario involves long-standing customers with special agreements where it was overlooked for too long that they are still on outdated pricing structures. This is not as rare as one might think—and it does not necessarily stand out immediately.

If transport prices and terms / ancillary costs are stored in the CRM in a structured way per customer, this makes analysis much easier.

Equip sales teams with the tools they need to achieve company goals—with the right CRM

All recommendations for increasing revenue even in more difficult times are based on strong tools and a solid data foundation.

In my consulting work, I have repeatedly spoken with users who acknowledge the strategic impact of their CRM—but find the software usage, user interface, and workflows extremely confusing.

This is one of the decisive factors when configuring a CRM for success:

• For each salesperson, it must be extremely easy to capture the relevant information—ideally without typing, simply via spoken language.
• It must look clean and be intuitive to use on a smartphone or tablet.
• Searching for data must be simple and, with AI support, possible in natural-language sentences.
• It must provide actionable recommendations—based on the available data—so each account manager knows what to do each day to reach the defined goals.
• It must present the most important company KPIs with trends and the current status of individual goal achievement in a highly visible way—even on mobile, when an employee opens the CRM on their phone with their first coffee in the morning.
• It must offer data structures aligned with the service portfolio to segment and analyze both existing business and pipeline effectively.
• It must provide the right interface for every level—
  simple and streamlined for operational staff,
  mobile for field sales,
  with dashboards for site managers, sales leadership, and management.

For CRM to work: adoption through ease of use

Strategy and data are of little value if the tool is not used in day-to-day work. Successful CRM configuration therefore means: simple data capture (ideally also via voice), intuitive mobile use, AI-supported search in natural language, clear daily action recommendations, and transparent KPI dashboards for employees, sales leadership, and management.

Conclusion

In the current environment, sales is not a “nice-to-have” but a steering instrument. Those who understand CRM as a data and decision platform, create alerts and transparency, and collaborate across departments reduce risks, stabilize existing revenue—and can even unlock growth potential.