Salesforce CRM and AppExchange Help DoubleClick Scale Globally and Provide Custom Tools to Staff and Customers

Leading Internet Marketing Company Supports Global Sales with Flexible Salesforce CRM Solution 

DoubleClick, the New York-based global Internet marketing technology company, knows marketing and sales. And it knows hosted solutions. After all, DoubleClick jumped into Internet-based marketing in 1996 as a pioneer in digital multichannel marketing and sells its own suite of hosted solutions for media planning and buying, campaign management, and ad management and serving. So when the company outgrew its SalesLogix solution in 2003, salesforce.com, the leader in cloud computing, was a natural choice. DoubleClick needed a solution its increasingly global staff could access anytime, from anywhere, that could easily scale to grow with the company, and that allowed the company to merge sales, marketing, and customer service and support databases to gain a unified view of its business. 

Another key reason for selecting salesforce.com, however, was the extreme flexibility of the platform underlying Salesforce CRM's applications. Decision makers knew they needed a solution that could adapt as quickly as their business needs changed. Company executives were convinced that the Force.com customization and integration tools would allow the company to easily tailor the solution as required. 

"Our business changes quickly and constantly. New products, new markets, and new strategies are business as usual," says Nicole Widder, Salesforce CRM administrator for DoubleClick. "We selected Salesforce CRM because we needed a solution we could modify, customize, and extend to keep pace with our expanding business." 

In line with the company's rapid pace of change, the goal when DoubleClick rolled out Salesforce CRM Sales in 2003 was to deploy the solution quickly. Keeping the implementation simple and focusing on automating key sales processes helped DoubleClick do just that: More than 250 users were up on the system in fewer than ten weeks.

Diverse Needs, Diverse Applications 

As soon as users tapped into the power and flexibility of the solution, requirements for customizations and extensions began rolling in. Marketers in the European office, for example, wanted to ensure that DoubleClick was the premier brand in the U.K., Germany, and France. A key metric for measuring progress on that goal was mentions of DoubleClick in the media. Plans to track details about press mentions such as the source, products mentioned, and the tone (positive or negative) soon materialized. 

Within weeks, Widder worked through multiple iterations and deployed a custom Salesforce CRM application created with  the Force.com builder. DoubleClick offers marketing services to its customers, so the real payoff for the new application materialized when specific account managers at DoubleClick started using it to correlate customers' and prospects' media mentions, multiplying the project's ROI and demonstrating the power and flexibility of the Force.com platform. 

Another custom-built application tracks the progress of request for proposal (RFP) responses. "A significant portion of our business comes from responding to RFPs," explains Widder. "Before we had this tool, no one was managing the RFP process. There was no visibility into status, and our proposals were being generated on an ad hoc basis with inconsistent results." 

The RFP tracking tool brings discipline and visibility to the proposal process, tracking the required resources, time expended, activities, and milestones during the proposal's development. This new custom object augments the Salesforce CRM opportunity object, and the proposal document itself is also stored within the tool. 

More important, because the RFP application is tied to opportunities, DoubleClick now measures the results of proposal efforts by the revenue they generate. This insight allows DoubleClick to make optimized decisions about assigning resources to new RFPs, and the company can feed best practices back into the proposal process.

One-Stop Shop, Created in Weeks with Minimal IT Resources 

DoubleClick's implementation of Salesforce CRM has evolved into a one-stop shop for sales representatives and other employees to access all the information they need. The most recent addition to the implementation is a Tools application.
 

"Before Tools, sales teams had to navigate to multiple systems to do their jobs," says Widder. "Tools pulls together access to all of the systems reps need. They can check pricing and our rate cards, obtain deep account intelligence through our data warehouse, collaborate with peers, track cases through our legacy support system, plot accounts on Google maps, and search the corporate knowledge base-all without leaving Salesforce CRM." 

During its two years of use, DoubleClick has created countless customizations and extensions—large and small—to Salesforce CRM. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the company's journey, however, is the fact that a single Salesforce CRM administrator implemented all of the customizations. "Customization is very smooth," says Widder. "We can turn around requests for new capabilities within days, which wasn't the case prior to using Salesforce CRM."

More Innovation on the Way
 

The innovation is far from over. Up next is a new project management application, inspired by a similar application available in the AppExchange marketplace, home of hundreds of pre-built, pre-integrated applications created by salesforce.com customers, developers, and partners. Other innovations include a new solution for optimizing presales activities and a deduplication application to help ensure clean customer data. DoubleClick is also investigating AppExchange partner solutions for managing commissions and partner relations and considering posting its own products to the directory.

"Through all the customizations and extensions created with Force.com, Salesforce CRM has become the universal system of record for our customer information," says Widder. "It is the venue we use for centralized access to all of our customer-related systems."

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