Intergraph Achieves 95% Forecast Confidence with Salesforce CRM

Intergraph specializes in helping governments and businesses visualize and manage complex spatial information with software solutions that, for example, help agencies dispatch, command, and control emergency services to those in crisis. The company prides itself on providing solutions that enable its clients to make the “right decisions at the right time, using the right information.”

Internally, Intergraph’s sales and marketing employees turn to applications from salesforce.com to help them make the right decisions. Salesforce CRM delivers a unified view of Intergraph customers, which are spread across 60 countries worldwide. The cloud-computing solution also provides Intergraph with visibility into its global sales pipeline and central control over its sales and marketing processes.

More critically, with complex sales cycles that can stretch to 24 months, Intergraph now has the means to grapple with high variability in matching forecasts to 95% of actuals, ensuring the company understands its earnings targets. “First and foremost, we wanted better forecasting as well as visibility into our pipeline worldwide and we definitely have that with Salesforce,” says Faun Clark, Global IT Application Manager at Intergraph.

The fact that Salesforce CRM is a truly global solution with comprehensive features is a reason the solution is so popular among Intergraph executives and users alike. “Salesforce proved to be robust in terms of functionality and could be accessed from anywhere,” Clark explains. “As a result, one of our major successes with Salesforce has been the adoption of the “Walk, Then Run: Easing into Worldwide Deployment” program.

Walk, Then Run: Easing into Worldwide Deployment

When Intergraph deployed Salesforce CRM, the company used salesforce.com implementation partner Astadia to help with a rapid eight-week deployment. It was decided upfront to start simple and grow the system with the organization. Deployment under this plan was easy. Intergraph rolled out Salesforce CRM to successive geographic regions, achieving global coverage in about a month,

Next up, Intergraph incorporated its Management Operations Systems sales methodology and processes into Salesforce CRM, including consistent definitions of sales stages and percentage probability. The result: global consistency in sales processes, behavior, messages, and sales language, which translated to more accurate and consistent data and reporting—all available in real-time. Most compelling, Salesforce CRM enabled Intergraph to provide forecasting visibility to its global sales pipeline for the first time in company history. Salesforce CRM has become such an integral facet of Intergraph’s business that, as Clark states, “Sales reps are required to use Salesforce.com for the global tracking of opportunities.”

Intergraph maintains its high user adoption rate by requiring users to attend training regardless of their title or usage of the system. While all employees are required to take online tutorials to gain access to Salesforce CRM, sales representatives take an additional one-hour sales training course focused on work processes with a regional sales administrator. The Intergraph salesforce.com administrators also offers training sessions for users who need additional training on a specific topic and training for new features releases is offered as new software innovations are released. 

Intergraph also moved the management and maintenance of Salesforce CRM out of marketing and into the global IT organization. “Salesforce is a business application the entire company can benefit from,” Clark says. “Moving our Salesforce program into IT made it successful because it is a global standard platform for sales and marketing.” Today, over 500 users from finance, sales, and marketing, as well as executives, rely on Salesforce."

To make Salesforce CRM successful at Intergraph and focus on the global perspective, a change control board (CCB) was created so that each region has a ‘voice’ in regard to the changes, new features and issues with the system. This provides ownership of the system to the globe. Requests to the CCB when implemented are communicated to all users. “Communication is key,” says Clark.

AppExchange: Extending Solutions, Improving Processes

Making Salesforce CRM relevant for users throughout the company is easy with applications from AppExchange. Intergraph uses several apps—many of them free— from salesforce.com’s online marketplace to extend the value of Salesforce CRM. Whenever a group needs a solution to solve a business problem, AppExchange and Salesforce.com Training & Certification are the first places Clark looks for solutions.

“With the AppExchange, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel and invest a lot of time on development,” Clark explains. “We find that AppExchange apps provide very quick value with minimal development effort.”

One such AppExchange application is Eloqua, which Intergraph uses to segment leads. When a Web-to-lead form is completed for a white paper, demographics are collected and that lead is nurtured through marketing, but is not qualified for sales. On the other hand, if a lead completes a form and provides demographics as well as budgeting and timeframe for purchasing, that lead is automatically routed via workflow rules to sales. Eloqua ensures that all leads come into a “ nurture pool,” but that only those that need immediate attention by sales are brought to the attention of sales.

Another application that Clark downloaded and installed from AppExchange is RingLead Declone from RingLead. The application prevents duplicates by matching and updating existing contacts or leads from online contact forms or imported lists. The declone of a lead happens automatically. Duplicates are a big issue in any CRM system and to have the duplicates handled automatically saves a great deal of time and money for Intergraph. Merging duplicates is not the best use of time. 

Intergraph has also leveraged Force.com's builder, a point-and-click development tool from salesforce.com, to develop custom applications that have enabled a broad range of processes and functions, such as marketing project management, marketing collaboration, event management and budgeting, and expense reporting. One custom application, Marketingforce, is used to track events and marketing projects by the company’s and marketing team.

The Simple Sell: Executive Buy-In

With visibility into sales pipelines and streamlined processes companywide, Intergraph finds it easy to drive improvements in sales effectiveness. Because consistent opportunity data is maintained in the system, the quality of the conversation between sales managers and sales reps can be elevated. As Clark explains, “We now have much higher adoption and better executive sponsorship as a result of our successes with Salesforce. Salesforce has really proven itself at Intergraph.”

With Salesforce CRM’s award-winning ease-of-use and real-time analytics, such as dashboards, Intergraph has also achieved greater executive participation. “Executives see the value of Salesforce and are on board with our initiatives,” Clark notes. Reports and dashboards have made it possible for executives to become proactive in strategic deals. In addition, an increasing number of users rely on Salesforce data for pipeline forecasting."

Up Next: Build on Success with Salesforce CRM

To further build upon Intergraph’s success with Salesforce CRM, Clark is now focused on data cleansing and integrity. She has launched an initiative to scrub and augment account data within Salesforce CRM to further increase the integrity and quality of Intergraph’s leads. Clark is also implementing Salesforce CRM Partners on a small-scale in South America, with plans to expand globally in the coming year. Currently, leads are sent to distributors using an email forward within Salesforce CRM. Those leads are then tracked by Intergraph executives using Excel spreadsheets. By moving deal registration to salesforce.com’s channel management solution, Clark hopes to provide Intergraph partners with the ability to update leads in real-time, and in turn deliver even more pipeline visibility to her executives

visit Intergraph