Salesforce.com Helps Associated Newspapers Ltd Win the Circulation Battle

Challenge

• Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) is the management company for five major U.K. newspapers: The Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard, London Metro, Irish Mail on Sunday, and Loot
• ANL’s Circulation Department needed to provide its field-based retail sales professionals and sales management with a real-time view of the newspaper circulation landscape in the UK
• The company needed to replace the existing, expensive Access database that lacked expansion flexibility
• ANL wanted to provide a tailored, on-demand sales management system quickly and cost-effectively that embraced a multitude of different records, fields, and tabs—together with a unique front-end user interface

Solution

• ANL deployed the Force.com Platform as a Service (Paas) from salesforce.com to quickly design, develop, and deploy a new type of circulation management application, on-demand and without using any software
• The Sales Force Automation on-demand system is used by 38 staff to compile a comprehensive profile and activity history of each of the retailers—and seamlessly share this information with the regional and national sales managers
• ANL placed circulation staff on a brief salesforce.com Education course and they were quickly experts on the Force.com point-and-click configuration tools

Results

• Salesforce introduced drill-down, customized dashboards that provided Managers with a near real-time view of the circulation landscape across the UK
• Salesforce played an important role in helping maximize the volume of newspapers sold by retailers
• Salesforce allowed ANL to quickly design, develop, and deploy a new type of circulation management application, on-demand and without using any software
• It took us four months between choosing Salesforce and going live; using a traditional application server, ANL estimates that the development, deployment, and maintenance, would have taken more than one year
• The team has built custom user interfaces, workflow, and security functionality in a fraction of the time required by traditional platforms
• The system provided users with key reporting data such as retail newspaper sales, as well as enabling management to monitor in-field activity