Solid Cactus Boosts Earnings and Increases Efficiencies with Custom-Tailored Salesforce Deployment

“Salesforce is worth the premium. In our first three months we saw a $100,000 increase in earnings, not to mention time savings and the ability to work efficiently with our CRM system."


Challenge
  • Solid Cactus—designer of more e-commerce Web sites in the Internet Retailer Top 500 than any other provider—needed a CRM system that could provide the functionality and customization it required
  • Performance issues and broken dashboards continued to plague the company a year after implementing Siebel On Demand
  • Despite paying an additional $150 a month for mass email capabilities, the company was unable to send emails directly from its existing CRM system
  • Additional key requirements included reporting capabilities, service and support features, and custom tabs

Solution
  • Solid Cactus selected Salesforce Enterprise Edition over Microsoft CRM for its functionality, dashboards and reporting, and powerful lead generation capabilities; it later upgraded to Salesforce Unlimited Edition
  • The company swapped out Siebel On Demand in three months, and tapped Salesforce partner CRM Manager to assist with data migration
  • Executives who refused to use Siebel on Demand now easily create reports to track pipeline, cases, and deal progress in Salesforce
  • Cisco Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) enables salespeople to get a screen pop of a customer’s record during a sales call
  • Salesforce automates functions like case and solution management, and it provides Web-to-case and email support capabilities
  • Using Salesforce Marketing campaigns, Solid Cactus sends targeted mass emails
  • ExactTarget integration reduces the time it takes to send professional e-mail communications by 75 percent, and it enables the company to leverage Salesforce data to create tailored promotions
  • To add even greater functionality to Salesforce, the company installed the following apps from the AppExchange marketplace:

- Salesforce for Google AdWords enables Solid Cactus to evaluate the effectiveness of its Google advertising campaigns and Web site lead generation activity

- Recruiting manages open jobs and candidate information

- Generic SSO provides single sign-on capabilities to authenticate users

- Staff Manager tracks employee information, salary history, benefit information, and time off

- Event Management, which the company renamed “Webinars,” links online event registrations to opportunities


Results
  • Solid Cactus attributes a $100,000 increase in earnings during its first three months using Salesforce to the ability to act on previously neglected and lost opportunities
  • Screen pops save as many as three minutes per sales call
  • Web-to-lead capability has dramatically reduced response time and allows the company to contact new leads within 15 minutes of receiving an inquiry
  • Greater visibility into the pipeline boosts sales, while workflow rules ensure no opportunity is neglected
  • Planned replacement of the company’s project management system using Salesforce custom tabs will allow Solid Cactus to store all client contact within Salesforce and will eliminate the need to manage two separate systems
 
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