Salesforce CRM and Force.com Accelerate Freeman's Expansion into New Sales Market

Challenge

• Freeman, a leader in producing expositions, corporate events, conventions, and exhibit programs, needed a sales force automation solution for its new corporate sales division.
• An existing legacy system failed to meet the needs of this rapidly growing division.
• As a large enterprise, it was vital that the new solution scale to the entire company as other divisions migrated to the new solution .
• Companywide user adoption was crucial to implementation success.

Solution

• The company was so impressed by the way salesforce.com representatives aligned their presentation to the exact requirements outlined in Freeman's RFP—customizability, fast deployment, real-time reporting—that it ultimately selected Salesforce CRM Sales over other solutions.
• Freeman employed the help of salesforce.com's implementation partner MW Advisors to initially deploy to 120 users in eight weeks with, with Microsoft Outlook integration.
• The Force.com platform powers integrations to Lawson, legacy systems, homegrown systems, and the corporate Web site.
• From the AppExchange marketplace, Freeman installed two applications: a project management tool that provides automated alerts for the expo sales team, and a de-duplication solution that keeps the enterprise's data clean.
• Salesforce CRM Marketing delivers automated integration from lead to campaign via the company's Web site and then routes leads to appropriate sales divisions.
• Real-time analytics and forecasting capabilities with customized dashboards present information and data results the way top executives prefer to see them.

Results

• The success of the initial deployment, due to ease of use and ongoing support, led to enterprisewide deployment to 800 sales reps.
• Accelerated productivity, enabled by Salesforce CRM, helps Freeman rapidly expand into new corporate market .
• Real-time dashboards keep management's fingers on the company's sales pulse.
• The cloud-based, cost-free infrastructure and the ease with which sales staff can customize their own systems independently slashed company IT costs.