ServePath Revs Up Conversion Rates with Salesforce CRM and Google AdWords

David Hecht is vice president of sales and marketing at ServePath, a leading dedicated server provider and hosting specialist. ServePath provides custom solutions and managed services for businesses that need a powerful Internet hosting platform. They also provide co-location services through its ColoServe division. The employee-owned company has offices, and its own data center, in San Francisco, Calif.

What issues were you were facing in your business that led you to consider Salesforce CRM?

We started using Salesforce CRM when we started the company in 2002. At that time we only had a few sales people and we needed a way to track customer data and keep it all in one place. We also really liked the pay-as-you-go model. Since then, we’ve integrated Salesforce CRM with our billing system and help ticketing systems, and we rolled out Salesforce CRM Service in February.

What other solutions did you consider?

None—we started out with Salesforce CRM Group Edition—it was affordable and simple. When we were evaluating systems to move the whole company to, we looked at several competitors but decided on Salesforce.com as the best option for its integration of service and support capabilities into the SFA system that we already knew.

Once you chose Salesforce CRM, how did you get started?

We did it ourselves. Implementation is kind of a strong word—we pretty much used Salesforce CRM out of the box when we were first getting started. Over time, the system has really changed and evolved with our company. We used a consultant to get our service and support organization up and running in February 2007, and now our whole company uses the solution.

We upgraded to Salesforce CRM Professional Edition in 2004, and started using the Web-to-lead functionality pretty heavily. We have four primary Web sites and they all integrate with Salesforce CRM. Then, in 2005, we adopted Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition to integrate our billing system onto Salesforce. Now we’re on Unlimited Edition and everyone in the company has a license. The Unlimited Edition has given us full-time access to the Force.com sandbox for testing and further integration projects, as well as ongoing help with administration needs directly from Salesforce CRM support staff. We do all our service and support using Salesforce CRM and we have a large team of both support and operations staff that uses the system 24 by 7. We handle internal help tickets as well as requests from customers.

What advice would you give companies like you getting started with Salesforce CRM?

Give yourself some time to get started. There’s a lot you can do with Salesforce CRM; we really appreciated having the consultants in to help us out and give us ideas on how to automate our workflow.
Take the time to learn reporting. There is so much data there and so many ways to slice it; make sure you’re really able to leverage it. I love the fact I can produce a report of almost any data I want to see in just a few minutes myself. With our old system I had to request that someone write a SQL query to get at even basic customer data. Salesforce CRM’s dashboards are great too.

How are you using Salesforce CRM in your business now?

We manage our Google AdWords with Salesforce CRM. We have been able to create a heavy inbound lead volume so we collect information with Web-to-lead forms, and then route them automatically to the right sales rep. Sales then works the deals and we can see which words are successful and tie them to deals closing.

Technical support is a large part of our organization. As a managed hosting provider, we operate 24 by 7 by 365 and provide services to customers all over the globe. We're using Salesforce CRM for all technical support. We have a data center operations team that uses it for an internal and customer-facing ticket and order processing system. Next on the list is to automate orders coming from our accounting department.

We have dashboards for every part of our business—marketing, sales, and support. It is much easier to keep a handle on business performance when you can see so many key metrics graphically and on a single page. Plus it is easy to make changes to them, which is essential for a growing startup where things change frequently.

Did you use Google AdWords before you adopted Salesforce CRM? 

Yes, we ran AdWords campaigns before Salesforce CRM had the integration available. We were able to track conversion to leads, but now we can track our advertising spend right through to the opportunity and deal close, even though the majority of those closes happen offline via fax.

How has Salesforce CRM changed the way you’re marketing?

It's given us a better view into where to allocate more budget and resources. Our strategy is informed. Now we can look at ad groups critically and make better budget decisions based on ROI and results. We can see which words are successful. We can tie those ad campaigns to deals closing. We have a search engine marketing dashboard across all the search engines we use, so we can see highest revenue generating keywords and sources. 

We have been using campaigns for all email, paid search, and online marketing activities. We are tracking open rates, click-throughs etc., and now we can tell how many opportunities each activity generated and of that, how much has closed. We can see the ROI on our dashboards.
 

What advice would you give to small companies who haven’t used Google AdWords before?

All of our leads are inbound online, but our conversions happen offline, so to be able to track that back to a marketing event is pretty amazing. Even if it happened six months ago, that campaign is part of the lead record—it’s pretty slick.

The biggest thing for me and for my family though is that now my parents can start their retirement. They can travel and be away from the business with the peace of mind that business will continue. Salesforce CRM is easy to use, so the team can log in and get all the information they need. I’ve got the processes automated and we can continue to grow.

visit ServePath