Tulip Telecom doubles effective sales calls with Salesforce CRM

Full Case Study

Indian service provider Tulip Telecom Ltd delivers innovative IP based infrastructural solutions to enterprises across 1,415 locations nationwide. Tulip is the only service provider in its domain to provide end-to-end connectivity solutions, including network integration, enterprise data services and managed services. Its leased line, fibre and wireless services, which span metropolitan and rural India, are poised to expand out onto the global landscape via its US operations centre.

Tulip is currently ranked as the number one MPLS VPN service provider in India.

A need for gaining better control over growing a customer base

With 2,500 professionals looking after the current and future corporate networking needs of 1500 customers, Tulip recognised the advantages to be gained from a professional CRM solution.  In examining its primary CRM-related requirements, the service provider was able to define that its chosen CRM system should meet two critical objectives: to provide it with greater control of resources, and to increase sales team productivity.

Tulip had established an in-house solution for sales force automation in the early days, but soon realised its limits, in that it was only able to cater to its very basic requirements and lacked the capacity for establishing and promoting industry best practices. In searching for a new solution Tulip was looking to significantly extend the boundaries of its approach towards CRM.

Cloud CRM offers rapid expansion path

After evaluating various Indian CRM providers, as well as one or two major global players, Tulip settled upon a cloud-based CRM solution from salesforce.com. Tulip Telecom subscribes to a Salesforce CRM service, hosted in the cloud, which means it pays only for the number of users currently on the system. Unlike on premises solutions that require a large initial investment in infrastructure and software, expanding Salesforce CRM is as simple as picking up the phone to add more licences.

“One of the biggest deciding factors was that salesforce.com was able to offer us an account model that suits us down to the ground,” explains Deepinder Bedi, Executive Director, Tulip Telecom Ltd. We were looking for something with a great deal of flexibility and the scalability to grow rapidly with us.”

And, Tulip is in fact a fast pace business with an impressive rate of growth, having expanded its sales team from 40 to 200 within three and a half years. Company policy dictates that each newly recruited sales representative within its 12 sales offices receives a Salesforce CRM user license and user training.

“A distinct advantage of salesforce.com is that it is incredibly intuitive. We are able to integrate new employees through a mix of online tutorials and on-site training, which typically runs for one hour.”

Information stored centrally in the cloud is universally accessible

Tulip is using Salesforce CRM as a means for managing its entire end-to-end sales process. Leads are manually input or automatically captured from the website and guided through the system using workflow, to close of sale. All customer interactions are recorded at every stage and stored centrally against the client account to assist with ongoing customer service.

In Bedi’s opinion; “Having this wealth of knowledge at our fingertips when dealing with clients significantly increases our efficiency and professionalism. It also means that when a representative leaves or receives a transfer, someone new is immediately equipped to pick up where they left off.”

More recently Tulip has incorporated the function to generate customer proposals within the Salesforce CRM application, realising its objective of completing the end-to-end sales process in a single application.

“It makes sense to centralise all customer related data at a single location,” says Bedi “and when that location is in the cloud, new information can be deployed to all of our offices simultaneously through a single system update. This allows geographically separate teams to collaborate easily to meet customers’ requirements and service their needs with the greatest possible efficiency.”

More targeted campaigns and PR accountability with Marketing

Tulip subscribes to Marketing, which allows them to launch targeted campaigns – for example electronic DM (direct mail) – in response to the sales patterns identified in Salesforce CRM. In addition it offers the capability of measuring campaign ROI to gain an insight into which ones are achieving the greatest success and to repeat successful formulas.

Furthermore, the salesforce.com Marketing module provides Tulip with the critical ability to track public relations activities, encouraging the PR agency to remain proactive and giving Tulip a means for comparing budget against outcomes.

Flexibility to create a custom CRM solution

The flexibility of Salesforce CRM has allowed Tulip to make several customisations, creating an industry specific CRM solution, including managing the sales team’s compensation system within salesforce.com.

“Everything we do that is sales related can be accessed from within a salesforce.com window - essentially, we are using one interface across all sales processes” says Bedi.

“Salesforce CRM’s easy reporting templates give us the ability to set realistic KPIs based on accurate performance knowledge, as well as to calculate sales employees’ bonuses.”

AppExchange dramatically reduces development time and resources

Tulip is a big fan of the salesforce.com AppExchange application marketplace, where users can go to find additional applications to extend their use of salesforce.com. It was here where Tulip sourced the PR manager tool it used to build its PR application;
“It took us 30 minutes to develop our PR application from an AppExchange template, as opposed to a possible seven days for developing the application from scratch,” says Bedi.

The service provider has also expanded its system by adding Salesforce for Google Addwords, the Wikiforce package and Hoovers using plug-ins available through the AppExchange, saving on time, effort and development resources.

Dashboards give an at-a-glance overview of operations

Dashboards are a key feature for Tulip, which has configured real time dashboards for senior managers, regional heads and one level below (the top four levels of management) plus separate ones for the marketing and PR teams, giving them valuable insights into business performance in the areas relating to them.

“Dashboards give us an at-a-glance reassurance that our people are out there making calls and meeting goals,” says Bedi. “If something isn’t going to plan, more often than not it will show up on a dashboard, so we have the chance to address the issue early.”

Tulip is using salesforce.com reports effectively for forecasting monthly revenues based on recent past trends. Previously it relied on Excel spreadsheets, which were time consuming to create and made it near impossible to maintain a corporate standard.

“The reporting process is heavily automated within salesforce.com, which creates huge time savings. But even more compelling is the accuracy with which we are able to set realistic goals and work towards using those to drive momentum in growing the business,” says Bedi.

Process efficiencies lead to increased productivity

Bedi estimates that the number of effective calls made by sales teams per week have roughly doubled as a direct consequence of the process efficiencies enforced by Salesforce CRM. The major advantage the system gives them is that they are simply far better prepared – they know exactly who the customer has met with in the past, what proposals have been sent, and so forth.

Tulip plans to continue to evolve its CRM system. It is currently looking at the future integration of a telecoms prefeasibility program that  carries out vital checks prior to picking up an order (for example, if a city bank requests connectivity with a regional branch, this application is used to check what type of services it is possible to run into that region).

However, Tulip is convinced its CRM is already providing a good return on investment, “we know exactly what is happening on the ground at all times, who is performing, who is not, which press releases have been issued, how many case studies we have completed, what events are going on – it is all revealed by looking at one screen!” states Bedi.

Tulip Telecom