Salesforce Assists U.S. Department of the Treasury Federal Consulting Group to Manage Sales, Pipeline, and Customer Information

"We can customize Salesforce Professional Edition to meet our unique agreement tracking requirements. Any changes made by one person are now seen by our entire team, and with built-in alerts, we never let an opportunity fall through the cracks."


Challenge
  • The Performance Measurement and Customer Satisfaction team in the Federal Consulting Group, a franchise of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, required a system to more effectively track and manage agreements with federal agencies
  • After its customer base grew and it acquired more staff, the team found it had outgrown its paper-based and Microsoft Excel tracking systems; it grew increasingly difficult to track customer contact information and to know which agreements were assigned to each customer
  • The team required an easy-to-use, readily accessible CRM solution that would be quick and easy to implement

Solution
  • With the help of Salesforce Tutorial, the team implemented Salesforce Group Edition by three people in less than a month
  • Agreements with different agencies are specified in Salesforce as "opportunities"; changes to an agreement, such as price or service type, are entered as modifications to the opportunity
  • Automated alerts along with reports indicate when agreements are coming to a close
  • Communications with customers are logged in activity history and matched to the specific opportunity
  • Customized fields store important agreement-specific information for easy access
  • Pipeline reports track what agreements are pending and what stage they are at in the process

Results
  • One central location of customer agreements puts everyone on the same page, streamlining productivity and increasing knowledge sharing
  • All customer contact information is stored in Salesforce, significantly reducing the time needed to find a telephone number or email address
  • Customers are contacted before agreements end, ensuring no loss of business
  • The team upgraded from Group Edition to Professional Edition to enable integration with Lotus Notes
  • Other areas of FCG are being added to Salesforce, which will store agreements and customer contacts from all business lines in one centralized location
 
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