ADC Lowers TCO, Improves Partner Management, and Gains Accurate Forecasts with Salesforce

"Our customers and partners depend on us to deliver the products and services they need when they need them. Salesforce.com helps us to better forecast production and service personnel demand by providing an easy to use tool for our sales team to deliver consistent, detailed customer opportunities throughout ADC."


Challenge
  • ADC Telecommunications, a leading global supplier of network infrastructure products and services, needed a new CRM solution to better meet complex international needs
  • With operations in two dozen countries, the company required support for multiple languages and currencies as well as anytime, anywhere access
  • ADC wanted to minimize its dependence on IT resources to better respond to changing business needs and be free of the never-ending cycle of time-consuming and expensive upgrades of its on-premise CRM system
  • Corporate executives were focused on achieving forecasting accuracy, which required a common global CRM solution that sales representatives would use more consistently
  • Because many channel partners drive significant revenue for ADC, the company also wanted to better serve and monitor its partners

Solution
  • ADC selected Salesforce after comparing its TCO against continuing to upgrade and maintain the existing CRM system
  • Salesforce's internationalization options, minimal IT requirements, and ease of integration also impressed the decision makers
  • With help from salesforce.com partner BenNevis, ADC successfully deployed Salesforce to more than 500 users worldwide in nine weeks; a year after implementation, login rates were 98 percent for the AMER region, 51 percent for the EMEA region and 43% for the APAC region
  • Automated workflows preempt data duplication problems before they occur
  • A Custom S-Control allows sales representatives to check their quota status from ADC's Commissioning System directly from within Salesforce
  • Three Successforce Premier customer service representatives support ADC operations worldwide

Results
  • Employees worldwide benefit from a localized SFA solution and easy access, resulting in increased sales activity per opportunity—a key metric for ADC
  • Executives enjoy the improved forecasting accuracy they envisioned
  • ADC has built on its Salesforce success by replacing a Web-based GUI bolt-on to its SAP system with Salesforce for its worldwide technical support organization
  • The salesforce.com CRM system helped ADC reduce IT support costs—by an average of ten hours per week
  • With Salesforce, project managers can create customizations in two minutes that took eight hours with the on-premise CRM system
  • ADC is evaluating various AppExchange offerings for channel management, and development environments
 
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