Salesforce Unlimited Edition Helps The Phoenix Companies Ignite Sales, Mobility, Productivity, and Development

"With Salesforce, we can get a clear picture of year-to-date and year-over-year progress towards sales goals. This is a first for us."

Overview
Challenge
  • Replace obsolete contact management systems without amassing large IT consulting or system fees
  • Deploy an easy-to-use yet sophisticated CRM system that provides mobile accessibility, low-cost modification capabilities, minimal training requirements, and simple integration with other apps
  • Minimize risks of outsourced application development, while keeping resource demands low
Solution
  • In less than two months, Phoenix implemented Salesforce SFA, leveraging the Force.com platform to extend the application and create customizations to track specialized contracts and the underwriting queue. After upgrading to Unlimited Edition to take advantage of features such as Salesforce Mobile and Force.com Sandbox, Phoenix created and published helpful new apps for its users.
Results
  • Costing less than a quarter of the project’s original budget, Salesforce cut resource usage by 75% and achieved 96% user adoption
  • With unprecedented tracking of the entire sales cycle, the company can reliably predict how increased investments will impact revenue
  • Thanks to mobile accessibility and better communication between field and inside sales, productivity is up and life insurance sales increased by more than 33% in 2005
Full Story
The Phoenix Companies offers a broad portfolio of life insurance, annuities, and investments to help meet the needs of affluent and high-net-worth individuals and of institutions. The company understands that competitive financial services businesses must consistently infuse their offerings with new technologies and more customized services. Small wonder, then, that Phoenix embarked on a strategic mission to rejuvenate its IT organization with a move to an outsourced vendor in 2004. The objective was simple: to increase agility and efficiency in order to maintain a competitive edge.

In large part, the company’s outsourcing decision made sense; it cut maintenance requirements and reduced the need for in-house software developers. But the move also posed challenges, particularly when a major new project surfaced. In keeping with its plan to revamp legacy infrastructure, Phoenix’s life insurance division needed to replace its outdated and heavily customized customer relationship management (CRM) system on a tight deadline. "We planned to double the size of our national sales team," says John Caine, director of technology for Phoenix. "And we needed a new platform to support this effort. We knew that improved CRM would be a key driver of our strategic growth, so we made replacing our old system a top priority."

The challenge, however, was that the new outsourcing model meant a downsized IT staff and a shortage of software developers to work on the project. In addition, a new platform would require careful coordination between multiple vendors and would force the division to pay hard dollars, rather than soft-dollar internal chargebacks. "We needed to go live in six months, in time for our national sales conference," explains Caine. "And we needed to do it with a new vendor and far fewer IT resources than we’ve used in the past." The investment in a new CRM system would only work if Phoenix could get full functionality in a flexible, low-cost, easy-to-deploy solution.

 

Implementation Under Budget, Ahead of Schedule

Caine’s team thoroughly investigated leading CRM solutions, including several vertical systems dedicated to financial services. In the end, onlySalesforce SFA from salesforce.com offered complete CRM functionality that met the division’s rigorous infrastructure requirements. Not only did Salesforce provide a Web-based, zero-infrastructure footprint, but it also enabled users to perform certain customizations without coding. As such, Phoenix could avoid the time and expense required for infrastructure setup and focus instead on implementation.

With the help of salesforce.com partner OKERE, Phoenix spent four weeks designing and building its new CRM solution. The total implementation cost was less than a quarter of the last system’s installation cost. And the total IT resource load? One analyst. "We started our pilot four months ahead of schedule," says Caine. "We used the extra time to gather more input from the sales teams." By the time of the national rollout, Caine and his business users had implemented dozens of changes themselves. "We didn’t even have to bother IT."

 

Low-Cost Customization Speeds Sales Tasks

In the months following the rollout of Salesforce to Phoenix’s 200 life distribution employees, a gap in the users’ workflow appeared. Every week, users generated hundreds of hypothetical financial illustrations. Caine needed a way to send proposals to financial advisors and save the PDFs for easy access in Salesforce.

"In the past," says Caine, "we solved problems like this by building a new application within our J2EE Web platform, but that is complex, time-consuming, and resource-intensive." So Caine took a different approach. Instead of building a new application from scratch, he asked IT to extend Salesforce using the Force.com platform.

"I got a Java developer and a UI designer for eight weeks," says Caine. At first, he was afraid they would not finish in that timeframe, but before lunch on the first day, the team already had successfully integrated Salesforce with the Phoenix Web environment. After two weeks, the application was finished—complete with a Web-based, drag-and-drop UI embedded within Salesforce. " We went into production six weeks early and spent 20 percent of what I had allocated," says Caine. " We use this tool to send, save, and review over 5,000 financial illustrations a month. I think developers work smarter and faster with Salesforce. They innovate and add value."

 

Unlimited Edition Provides Total Functionality

As Phoenix continued its Salesforce customizations and planned new developments, the division also had the opportunity to pilot Salesforce Mobile, a powerful mobile platform that helps on-the-go employees keep current Salesforce CRM data at their fingertips. "We realized as we worked with Salesforce Mobile that most of our users were only accessing Salesforce from their offices or homes," Caine recalls. "We wanted to capitalize on the functionality of Force.com by enabling all our users—even those in the field—t o have access to our CRM customizations." At the same time, Caine’s team wanted to minimize the risk of developing new applications, particularly when development would frequently be offshored to the outsourcing vendor. "We needed a safe, dedicated environment to test drive our customizations before publishing them," says Caine.

The answer was simple: an upgrade to Salesforce Unlimited Edition, which comes standard with the comprehensive tools that Phoenix needed—such as Salesforce Mobile and Force.com Sandbox, a production-quality replica of the Salesforce environment that supports development, testing, compliance, and training. "Mobile access to CRM data was critical to productivity in the field. Unlimited Edition delivered it—and more importantly, it permitted us to keep adding customizations in response to user feedback," Caine notes. "Furthermore, Sandbox helps us ensure new applications are ready for use, without disrupting our production environment or our users."

 

High User Adoption Contributes to Record Sales Increase

One year after rolling out Salesforce, Phoenix reached 96 percent adoption, indicating strong support from the sales organization. The metrics and productivity gains enabled by this almost-universal adoption also helped Phoenix grow its life insurance sales by 33 percent for a record-setting year. Such impressive results are to be expected, according to Caine. "Salesforce is easy to use, and that really helps. But I think the real reason our sales organization uses and succeeds with Salesforce is because it reacts quickly to their needs," says Caine.

For example, when the sales organization needed a way to track its yearly initiatives—s omething easier to use and share than the massive Excel worksheet they used for the previous two years—Caine helped program managers design and implement a new custom application within Salesforce. Using the power of point-and-click tools available via the Force.com platform, business users designed, linked, and deployed custom objects and tabs.

"We replaced the Excel sheet with a Salesforce custom app in just a few hours," explains Caine. In the process, the team took advantage of Salesforce’s sharing model and added a new way for employees to track their time against approved initiatives. "We wrote software without ever leaving our Web browsers," Caine notes.

In addition, Phoenix’s life insurance division has incorporated feeds from legacy systems to provide copies within Salesforce of both completed business and pipeline projects, such has applications currently in underwriting. "If we look at that data in conjunction with user activity and proposal generation, we can get a clear picture of year-to-date and year-over-year progress towards sales goals," Caine says. "This is a first for us—and it’s critical to sales force automation."

 

Streamlined Strategizing Spurs Competitive Growth

Another first for Phoenix is the centralization of its distributed marketing processes. Prior to implementing Salesforce, sales teams logged customer outreach activity in separate systems, with no means of tying everything together. With the help of the Force.com Web Services API, the division developed a complete custom app that establishes marketing objectives and then manages the outreach tracks—such as phone calls, emails, and mailings—necessary to reach those goals. "Now each user has his or her own strategic, manageable workload," explains Caine, "and they all roll up into an easy-to-read larger picture, in terms of both metrics and strategy."

Ultimately, these integrated customizations, plus the greater mobility and low-resource utilization afforded by Salesforce, are helping Phoenix align its IT systems and business processes to sharpen its competitive edge.

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