ShareBuilder 401(k) Taps the Small Business Market Thanks to Salesforce Deployment

“Salesforce is the lifeline of our sales team. We had a power outage on our office block last week for an hour, and the team considered going home so they could serve our customers. Nothing gets done without Salesforce.”


Challenge
  • ShareBuilder 401(k), a subsidiary of ING Bank, decided to target the underserved small business market (from 1 to 50 employees) and offer on-demand 401(k) plans; this required an extremely efficient solution that would help ShareBuilder provide high quality service to this large and diverse market
  • The company needed a system to enable automated, scalable sales operations including lead stage management, call priorities, customer activities, and tasks in a real-time manner
  • The inside team manages large volumes of inbound prospects each day so a solution that helps rank and prioritize leads based on sales team interactions, as well as the actual Web content consumed by prospects, was essential
  • Web automation and lead prioritization tools were a must to focus and deliver efficient, quality sales efforts

Solution
  • ShareBuilder selected Salesforce Enterprise Edition—launching it in tandem with a well-defined lead stage process in 30 days to 15 users with Microsoft Outlook integration
  • Web-to-lead capabilities allow the company to track a lead back to its source for better channel management
  • The addition of AppExchange apps enables sales tracking all the way back to the search keyword enabling more efficient AdWord buys
  • Marketing campaigns are measured through Salesforce to track which channels and campaigns are most efficient for driving qualified leads and closes
  • Reports and dashboards track and monitor leads, lead stages, open leads, number of closes, sales team activity, and more to adjust demand generation as needed
  • The accounting group runs reports from Salesforce using post-sale data uploaded weekly to process payments to partners like Costco
  • AppExchange apps Manticore Technology and Ringlead have been essential to establishing a best-in-class nurture Web and sales activity integration into Salesforce; this automates lead development for the team and includes real-time lead scoring
  • Three custom tabs: Assets Under Management, AEs, and Tracker—a mashup that tracks the install process—align Salesforce with the way ShareBuilder does business
  • One user is learning the Apex programming language to develop custom apps; the company attends the local user group to stay on top of new features

Results
  • ShareBuilder improved sales per rep by 67 percent since deploying and optimizing its Salesforce processes
  • Because reps now know when a prospect is on the company Web site and the content consumed, sales team has more relevant conversations with the most engaged prospects
  • Boosts in sales productivity are attributed to targeted marketing and near real-time, dynamic lead scoring engine
  • The company views its use of Salesforce as one of its competitive advantages
  • The AppExchange offers a vital resource from which to find apps that meet the company’s present and future business needs
 
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