Solid Cactus Experiences Earnings Boost by Replacing Siebel OnDemand with Salesforce

"We saw a $100,000 increase in earnings in our first three months on Salesforce because of our ability to act on previously neglected and lost opportunities. When you factor in time savings and the ability to work efficiently with the system, it becomes obvious that Salesforce is worth the premium."

Overview
Challenge
  • Needed a CRM system that could provide necessary functionality
  • Plagued by Siebel OnDemand’s broken dashboards and performance issues
  • Unable to send e-mail directly from Siebel OnDemand despite paying an additional $150 a month for the functionality
Solution
  • Solid Cactus swapped out Siebel OnDemand with Salesforce Enterprise Edition in less than three months. Salesforce Marketing allows the company to send targeted mass e-mails while Salesforce Call Center and Cisco CTI integration enable sales people to get a screen pop during calls. Solid Cactus builds its own custom apps on the Force.com platform and downloads and installs others from the AppExchange to add even greater functionality.
Results
  • Ability to act on previously neglected and lost opportunities led to a $100,000 increase in earnings in the first three months
  • Up to three minutes a call saved with screen pops
  • New leads contacted within 15 minutes of receiving an inquiry with Web-to-lead
  • Increased sales with greater visibility into pipeline
Full Story
Solid Cactus has designed more e-commerce Web sites than any other firm in the Internet Retailer Top 500--proof that the company knows what its customers want. Based in Wilkes-Barre, Penn., Solid Cactus built its business as a Yahoo store design agency and eventually expanded to become a full-service e-commerce design firm focused on designing, promoting, and helping store owners better manage their businesses.

As the company grew, so did its CRM needs. But Solid Cactus, which was recently named one of Inc. magazine’s fastest growing companies, was dealing with some prickly Web-based problems of its own. Impressed by a Siebel On Demand presentation, the company moved forward with a sales force automation implementation that failed to live up to expectations.

Dashboards started breaking as the company added users. Employees and executives refused to use the system. Solid Cactus paid an extra $150 a month to bolster Siebel OnDemand’s basic e-mail capabilities--and was unable to send a single e-mail. As a result, salespeople there struggled with a CRM system that just didn’t work.

"Functionally, Siebel OnDemand didn’t perform," says Justin Rattigan, chief operating officer at Solid Cactus. "There were frequent down times and frequent JavaScript errors multiple times a day, affecting multiple users. You would be on a call handling a sale and the whole screen would disappear on you. We were constantly writing information down in notepads so we wouldn’t lose everything."

Salesforce Replaces Siebel OnDemand

After a year, Solid Cactus had had enough. Frustrated sales executives labeled the Siebel On Demand implementation ineffective and began searching for a new CRM solution that could deliver scalability, performance, reporting, and customization. Though Solid Cactus executives briefly considered Microsoft CRM, they decided they wanted the flexibility and functionality of the Salesforce on-demand solution. Rattigan deployed and customized Salesforce Enterprise Edition himself in three months, and tapped salesforce.com partner CRM Manager to assist with data migration.

"We knew we wanted something on-demand," Rattigan explains. "We considered Microsoft CRM because we have an Exchange server in-house but ultimately we wanted something that would work perfectly right out of the box. We needed something that was flexible, easy to deploy, and easy to manage like Salesforce."

The impact of the new system was almost immediate: Employees have embraced the new system, leading to a sharp increase in adoption. Executives who refused to use Siebel OnDemand now clamor to create reports to track pipeline, cases, and deal progress. Visibility into the pipeline means salespeople can now follow up on previously neglected opportunities. Workflow rules alert managers and help the company discover opportunities that would otherwise have been lost.

"We saw a $100,000 increase in earnings in our first three months on Salesforce because of our ability to act on previously neglected and lost opportunities," Rattigan says. "Moving over to Salesforce is a dream come true for us because there is no way we can forget about anything we put inside Salesforce. When you factor in time savings and the ability to work efficiently with the system, it becomes obvious that Salesforce is worth the premium."

Rich, Pre-Packaged Functionality

With Salesforce, Solid Cactus gained the functionality it lacked with its previous system. For example, the Web-to-lead feature in Salesforce Marketing has significantly reduced response time with salespeople now reaching out to new leads within 15 minutes of receiving an inquiry. And mass e-mail, the feature the company paid Siebel extra for but couldn’t get to work, is a standard feature in Salesforce.

"We were never able to successfully send an e-mail from Siebel," Rattigan says. "With Salesforce Marketing, we rely heavily on the campaigns functionality. We get a lot better metrics because Salesforce takes marketing much further than a simple e-mail blast."

In addition, Solid Cactus integrated Salesforce with an e-mail solution from salesforce.com partner ExactTarget, reducing the time it takes to send professional e-mail communications by 75 percent. While marketing used to work off one generic e-mail list, the team can now manage its lists from within Salesforce and use Salesforce data to deliver targeted promotions.

World-Class Customer Support

Without e-mail integration or the ability to send e-mail outside of the system, Rattigan said he never considered using Siebel OnDemand for service and support. With Salesforce, it was an entirely different story. Following its success using Salesforce CRM, Solid Cactus decided to replace Autotask with Salesforce Call Center for service and support.

Salesforce Call Center empowers Solid Cactus to efficiently capture customer information with features like Web-to-case. And, Cisco Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) delivers even more effectiveness to the company’s service and support process. Salespeople now get a screen pop of a customer’s record when taking a call, saving as many as three minutes per sales call.

As business needs change, Solid Cactus also employs a wealth of solutions offered by salesforce.com and the AppExchange. The AppExchange marketplace allows Solid Cactus to pick and choose additional marketing and sales applications, adding even greater functionality to Salesforce. For example, Salesforce for Google AdWords enables Solid Cactus to evaluate the effectiveness of its Google advertising campaigns and Web site lead generation activity. A recruiting application, on the other hand, manages open jobs and candidate information. So far, the company has downloaded more than 15 different applications from the AppExchange.

More Innovation on the Way

The innovation doesn’t stop there though. Solid Cactus recently upgraded to Salesforce Unlimited Edition, gaining access to features such as Force.com Sandbox, Successforce Premier Support, and Salesforce Mobile. In the future, Solid Cactus plans to take advantage of the Force.com platform and Visualforce, which extends the power of Platform-as-a-Service with a highly flexible presentation layer based on standard Web technologies. With Visualforce, Solid Cactus will be able to customize the user interface and deliver a Salesforce experience tailored specifically to the company.

"By enabling us to remove superfluous fields, Visualforce will take what is already a superior customized solution and allow us to truly make it our own," Rattigan says. "Salesforce is already easy to use but Visualforce will make it child’s play."

A custom interface is merely the beginning for Rattigan who says he has several new projects in mind. Solid Cactus currently has 1,000 open projects with 100 people accessing those projects at all hours of the day. With five major departments that need the system for very different purposes, there is no off-the-shelf solution that can meet the company’s requirements. To handle this situation, Rattigan says he will use custom tabs to build a project management system on top of the Force.com platform and then customize the solution using Visualforce-saving his company hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process, and eliminating the need to manage two different systems.

"We went from using Siebel OnDemand for just SFA-and it didn’t even work for that-to using Salesforce for SFA, recruiting, call scripting, service and support, and Google AdWords," Rattigan summarizes. "Even though we pay a little more, we get a lot of additional usage from the app. Salesforce will be the platform our entire company runs on."

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