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Salesforce.com Translates into CRM Success Across 24 Countries for Bowne Global Solutions

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Dec. 14, 2004 — Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in on demand customer relationship management (CRM), today announced that Bowne Global Solutions (BGS), a leading provider of translation, interpretation and technical writing services, is using salesforce.com across 24 countries to improve service to its global accounts, enhancing both the customer experience and the total sale opportunity.

BGS, a business unit of Bowne & Co., Inc. (NYSE: BNE), is one of the 12,500 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of Oct. 31, 2004.

"Salesforce.com helps us better serve our customers," said Kevin Sher, vice president, sales, BGS. "At the individual level, our salesforce.com users have full account visibility and can leverage the best practices of other sales reps. This can help with cross-selling and increase an individual's total sale across various client divisions. The benefits obviously extend to a global level with master sales agreements and more."

BGS, whose clients include GE (NYSE: GE), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), the National Health Service in the UK, and the US Department of Justice, supports three different sales groups focused on localization, interpretation, and technical writing services. These clients operate out of multiple sites around the world and BGS maintains local, in-country relationships at each of these locations. As a result of this distributed support model, BGS needed a single global platform that could be accessed by reps worldwide and provide customer at the local and global account levels.

In 2002, the company, which had been using CRM software, acquired Berlitz GlobalNet, a salesforce.com customer since May 2000. Because of the success that Berlitz had already experienced with salesforce.com, including the ability of salesforce.com to give executive management a birds-eye view across the whole sales organization, BGS decided that salesforce.com was best suited for the global organization.

"Salesforce.com had worked extremely well for Berlitz and we were confident that it would continue to deliver the same success for BGS," said Sher, who was formerly vice president of sales at Berlitz. "It is the only CRM solution that delivers usability, customization and state-of-the-art functionality — with the on demand model that makes the most sense for global enterprises."

"Our industry is all about language and diversity and our global sales force reflects this," said Mary Alice Jewell, database marketing specialist, BGS. "Only salesforce.com could be customized to fit the various regional requirements within our user base."

Customized reports and dashboards provide immediate visibility into the worldwide pipeline and overall business health for sales executives. Custom views track financial data including booked revenue and allow BGS to track wins by region, country and individual sales rep. Views also track three different kinds of losses for better insight into win rates across its competitors.

"In the U.S., for example, sales meetings are built around dashboards," Jewell said. "Senior executives get a quick snapshot of how we are doing, what's on track, what we have in the pipeline, what's due to close. The ability to automatically roll up and analyze this data from 38 offices in 24 countries enables us to spend time managing our sales efforts, not accounting for them."

The benefits of salesforce.com extend beyond sales. BGS' research and development team is currently using the sforce Web services API to extend salesforce.com with an internal project tracking database.

"Our people rave about salesforce.com; it's just a matter of continuing to always deepen and broaden our usage," said Jewell. "Salesforce.com has proven itself to be committed to our success, and we look forward to a continued relationship."