Vistage Sees Shorter Sales Cycles With Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud

Challenge

• Vistage International, the world’s leading chief executive organization focused on coaching and development for the leaders of small and medium-sized companies, needed to organize customer data and share information with its independent business coaches.
• The company used a modified version of Onyx Customer Management with a custom Web front-end that didn’t have enough features and was difficult to update.
• Vistage wanted an easy-to-use cloud-computing solution it could quickly deploy and adapt over time.

Solution

• Vistage considered Siebel On Demand and NetSuite but chose salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud. With help from salesforce.com partner Astadia, the company deployed Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition to sales, marketing, event management, customer support, and more than 400 business coaches.
• The company uses Salesforce CRM Sales to maintain data on hundreds of thousands of leads, opportunities, and accounts. Jigsaw and ZoomInfo SF from the AppExchange help identify additional prospects.
• Vistage manages and measures thousands of events and email campaigns with Salesforce CRM Marketing and VerticalResponse for AppExchange.
• Salesforce CRM keeps business processes on track. Tasks, activities, and workflow rules keep leads flowing through the pipeline, and business coach screening and member recruitment moving ahead.
• Vistage uses the ideas functionality in Salesforce CRM Service to capture insights and suggestions from 14,000 members worldwide. Members can promote their favorite suggestions and use the platform to communicate with Vistage and one another.
• Integration with Microsoft Outlook syncs customer communications with Salesforce CRM.
• The company plans to add mobile access, and integrate Salesforce CRM with Microsoft Great Plains financials in the future.

Results

• With salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud, Vistage has shortened its sales cycles by 80%.
• The company now tracks leads through the entire lifecycle--from initial contact through close and renewal--for better business visibility and decision making.
• Marketers can measure baseline and calculate ROI for Web ads, search engine campaigns, and events, for more effective spending.
• Input gathered through Salesforce CRM Service spurs innovation and improves customer satisfaction.