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Yamaha Chooses Salesforce.com To Orchestrate CRM Success

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — November 11, 2004 — Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM), today announced that Yamaha Corporation of America , a provider of musical instruments, professional audio, and computer-related products to the United States market, has replaced several contact management systems and division-specific databases, as well as a customer service and support application, with Salesforce.com. Yamaha is using Salesforce.com to manage interactions with its channel and distribution partners across numerous product lines, as well as track sales and marketing promotions related to dealers, institutions and individual artists.

Yamaha is one of the 12,000 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of September 30, 2004.

"We're a vast organization with complex processes and complex sets of data," said David Bergstrom, corporate planning manager, Yamaha Corporation of America. "Salesforce.com delivered the only CRM that could be quickly customized and deployed to give us a full view of current account status - whether that account is a dealer, co-partner, an individual artist or an institution such as a church or school that is installing a complete music teaching and performance facility including products from four or five Yamaha divisions."

Established in 1960, Yamaha Corporation of America consists of several sales and marketing divisions (e.g. piano products, band and orchestral instruments, professional audio products, guitar, drum, portable keyboard, synthesizer products, commercial audio systems products, consumer products, and factory automation products). In addition to these product divisions, Yamaha has a Music Education Division and a corporate administrative division which includes finance and operations.

Prior to Salesforce.com, Yamaha maintained several separate systems and databases to track customer interactions. As part of a broad business process reengineering to complete its three- and five-year financial goals, Yamaha determined a need to consolidate these systems into a single, complete CRM system and began to investigate large software packages from PeopleSoft (NASDAQ: PSFT) and SAP (NYSE: SAP).

"When it came to selecting a CRM system, ease of integration was critical," Bergstrom said. "We need a CRM that can integrate with systems such as our custom pricing engine in a single user portal that will eventually be exposed to our dealers and our channel partners. Salesforce.com was the only CRM that could be immediately deployed with full integration capabilities to match our future requirements."

After signing with salesforce.com in November 2003, Yamaha rolled out Salesforce.com nationwide to sales, marketing, credit, operations and artist relations staff across the USA and worked with Salesforce.com service partner WisdomNet to set up its security model and customize the application for a wide range of end-users and management.

Currently, Yamaha subscribers access Salesforce.com in the field and office to track and manage customer data as well as sales and call activities. Salesforce.com's integrated campaign management functionality allows Yamaha to manage interactions around dozens of sales promotions and the hundreds of trade shows it attends each year and sort out leads for calls to action. Salesforce.com is also used by Yamaha's new Institutional and Commercial Services department to coordinate all marketing and sales activities to large organizations. "We use Salesforce.com to manage interactions with our existing channel and distribution partners, especially where they do overlap," Bergstrom said. "Most of our dealers' buyers are specific to individual product categories, and now we can streamline the process, because we have one unified place where we can see what's going on: Salesforce.com."