At BakBone, Salesforce CRM Marketing and Custom Apps Protect Leads and Customer Satisfaction

Challenge

• BakBone Software, a global provider of heterogeneous integrated data protection software, wanted to better support its customers in the company's fast-paced, global environment.
• Legacy Goldmine and Heat systems strained to support the company’s global operations, customer self-service requirements, and CRM processes across sales and support. Spreadsheets and email were used to track leads.
• BakBone’s regional operations each had their own CRM solution and business processes, creating administrative challenges and operational inefficiencies
• The company required a platform to build new applications as it grew. It also wanted to replace an inhouse contract database.

Solution

• BakBone chose Saleforce CRM for its flexible security, multilanguage support, extensive customization tools, and cloud-computing model. The company rapidly deployed Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition globally to users in marketing, sales, support, and IT in just 5 months.
• BakBone soon upgraded to Salesforce CRM Unlimited Edition for unlimited AppExchange apps and Force.com's sandbox testing environment.
• Workflows trigger all customer touchpoints along with the marketing lifecycle starting with the evaluation. Following the launch of a new entry-level product, BakBone used workflows to convince customers to upgrade.
• Salesforce CRM Marketing automates BakBone’s closed-loop processes between leads, opportunities, customers, and proactive, streamlined customer support based on knowledge of products purchased.
• The company is systematically attaching all leads to specific campaigns to track campaign results and lead source with Salesforce CRM Marketing.
• Dashboards are used to monitor lead activities based on sales geography.
• BakBone downloaded and installed the Contract Management & Proposal Suite from Apttus for contract management from AppExchange.
• BakBone uses the Apttus application to streamline contract reviews and approvals. In the future, the solution will be deployed in the field to eliminate multiple touches.
• BakBone integrated Salesforce CRM with its JD Edwards ERP system with Cast Iron Systems’ Cast Iron Integration Solution. 
• Using the Force.com Labs applications found on AppExchange as starter templates, the company built the following custom apps on the Force.com platform:

- IT Management, to manage change management for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance
- License Key Generator, to automatically generate unique license keys for customers based on the BakBone products in use
- Travel Authorization, to electronically authorize and validate travel requests
- HRForce, to manage all human resource information globally
- Maintenance Renewal, to automatically generate quotes for renewals using a report that tracks renewals that are 90 days out

Results

• Using Salesforce CRM Marketing to automatically nurture prospects in real time reduced the lead follow-up time from days to minutes.
• BakBone now follows up on 100 percent of leads.
• Salesforce CRM Marketing’s Web-to-lead functionality brings in over 2,000 leads per month.
• The integration of Salesforce CRM with JD Edwards has reduced order processing resources by 50 percent, freeing resources for other high-value activities.
• The company has significantly reduced costs with custom apps: Maintenance renewal revenues have significantly improved while the travel authorization application has eliminated paper from the process.
• BakBone plans to build its own self-service customer portal within Salesforce CRM. With 60 percent of support cases now created electronically, this move will further reduce call volume and call center costs.