Cramer using Salesforce SFA to Manage Relationships with the World’s Leading Telco Providers

"We needed one consistent view of revenue forecasts, potential bookings, and when we could draw down the revenue. Salesforce was the only vendor that offered this flexibility out-of-the-box—along with a significant amount of other powerful functionality."

Overview
Challenge
  • Replace outmoded client server application
  • Increase sales effectiveness
  • Maximize sales productivity
  • Maximize user adoption
Solution
  • Deployed Salesforce.com sales force automation (SFA) among 152 professionals to create a single, comprehensive view of its Tier 1 telcos and other customers
Results
  • Enhanced customer service, satisfaction, and loyalty
  • Enabled the company to track sales pipeline over complex and often protracted sales lifecycle
  • Enabled marketing team is able to concentrate efforts on the right customer segments and target audiences
  • No up-front technology investment and drawn-out deployment; minimal impact on IT resources
Full Story

Enterprise OSS software leader for the telecommunications industry, Cramer, was frustrated by the lack of functionality in its existing CRM system. Information was held in different databases making a single view of a customer very difficult for its sales force. Cramer also found significant limitations in client server based architecture for its globally dispersed teams. Cramer undertook a detailed review of hosted CRM applications and was won over by the breadth and depth of functionality and ease of use of Salesforce SFA. By introducing this market-leading hosted CRM solution in only 6 weeks, Cramer is maximizing sales effectiveness, delivering a rewarding service to Tier 1 telcos and other customers, and transforming sales, marketing and service productivity. AppExchange from Salesforce.com is also bowling them over.

Cramer is a leader in the enterprise OSS software market. The company provides the software that telecom service providers use to automate the many processes that manage their networks and resources. Cramer’s solutions span individual service fulfillment to large-scale network planning or provisioning. The company was founded in 1996.

Cramer markets its OSS solutions to many of the world’s Tier 1 telco service provider customers, including BT, Vodafone, Bell, and KPN. Previously, the company relied upon on a fragmented and disconnected set of systems to manage relationships with these important customers. Information relating to sales, licenses, maintenance, support and education was all locked away in a multitude of separate systems. At the heart of this was a client server based sales management system, which, according to Mark Fellowes, Sales Operations Director, Cramer, offered limited sales functionality.

Single View of the Customer

"One of the key features that the existing system lacked was a forecasting mechanism," he says. "This meant that we had no automated mechanism for sales managers to report their view of the forecast value of deals-or when they would come in. Equally important, we had no easily accessible single view of our customers. When a member of the sales team visited a customer, they frequently had limited information concerning support calls that the customer may have recently logged, and incomplete transaction history for all area’s of the business."

Right from the start, Fellowes and his team were adamant that they wanted to deploy a hosted Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. "With our sales teams continually traveling the world, we wanted to ensure they had a comprehensive, real-time insight into each customer from anywhere that offered an Internet connection," he says. "Moreover, our IT team was under constant pressure to maintain the client/server-based systems, whereas a hosted CRM solution would allow them to devote time to other key tasks."

Cramer evaluated solutions from Salesforce and other leading vendors in great depth. And, like the overwhelming decision to focus on a hosted CRM solution, the overwhelming vote was for Salesforce. "We needed one consistent view of revenue forecasts, potential bookings, and when we could draw down the revenue that had booked in a flexible, non-linear way. Salesforce was the only vendor that offered this flexibility out-of-the-box-along with a significant amount of other powerful functionality," explains Fellowes.

Cramer initially deployed Salesforce.com sales force automation to 152 staff, including sales teams, management executives, Support and Maintenance Services, Project Managers, Marketing, and Consulting Services Teams. The implementation was completed in only 6 weeks, compared with months, or even years for traditional client server based CRM solutions. The result is a single, co-ordinated, and comprehensive view of each and every customer relationship-across any channel. The browser-based environment offers Cramer deep insight into leads, accounts, opportunities, and territory management. They have the flexibility to quickly analyze summary or in-depth views of forecasts, quotes, documents, assets deployed at a customer site, and the current status on marketing campaigns. The successful roll-out of the application created greater demand from Cramer employees to participate in sharing and viewing customer data. As a result Cramer now has approximately 200 users of Salesforce.com. We believe AppExchange will enable further return on the investment Cramer has made in the Salesforce.com application. - Mark Fellowes Sales Operations Director

"The sales cycle for our OSS software solutions can last over many months, and involves complex inter-relationships and sales negotiations with customers," says Fellowes. "With Salesforce, we can track tasks and activities in a co-ordinated way. We use the custom alerts and rules to automatically notify individuals of critical business events which also helps co-ordniation. All of this enables us to closely monitor the status of a deal and move it through the pipeline to closure.

AppExchange -the Groundbreaking On-Demand Application-Sharing Service

Fellowes and his team are also interested in the new AppExchange platform from salesforce.com. This groundbreaking on-demand application-sharing service represents a new online center where salesforce.com subscribers, partners, and developers can share their on-demand applications for everything from handling expense management to tracking purchasing, monitoring recruiting, and beyond.

"We believe AppExchange will enable further return on the investment Cramer has made in the Salesforce.com application. The Services Project Manager AppExchange application would be particularly valuable in providing resource assignment based revenue forecasting for our Services business. We are also interested in the Compensation Tracking application.


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