Salesforce.com instrumental in helping MeetingZone double revenues year-on-year

Case Study

If you're selling into large enterprises, it invariably helps to act like a large enterprise. This is the ethos behind MeetingZone's success, the UK's largest independent conference services provider. That means choosing state-of-the-art systems like salesforce.com. By standardizing on the multi-tenant business service, the company is automating many day-to-day processes and maximizing sales productivity. The choice has paid off over the years too: since deploying Salesforce across the organization, MeetingZone has almost doubled its revenue year on year.

Corporate class conference call services

MeetingZone is the largest independent, UK-owned conference services provider, focused on providing world class, effective conference call services at highly competitive rates. Established in 2001, the company has rapidly become the partner of choice for business critical, conferencing services for many of the top European and global corporations.

The company's founding mission back in 2001 was to create a corporate class organization from day one. Indeed, the total ethos of the company is to get it right—from the start. After all, it was important that the company positioned itself as a credible leader in conference services given that it would be targeting large enterprise customers. This vision of 'doing it right' applies right across the fabric of the organization: from the people and products—through to the way it manages customer relationships.

In terms of customer relationship management (CRM), MeetingZone needed a system which was capable of cost effectively capturing and tracking any interaction with any customer through any channel. The unified source of customer information was, according to Tim Duffy, CEO and co-founder, MeetingZone central to the company's future success.

"It was important that we protected our intellectual property in one consolidated environment, not in a set of disparate and fragmented systems. Looking back six years ago to when we first chose salesforce.com, even then we could see this was a company with a remarkable vision and a very strong product strategy. The idea of the business web was closely aligned with our web services delivery strategy as well. In our opinion, salesforce.com was the right choice then, and—based on their meteoric growth, proven success and outstanding track record—salesforce.com remains the hosted CRM system of choice."

Complete, real time picture of sales

MeetingZone deployed Salesforce to twelve staff, immediately creating a single comprehensive view of each and every conferencing customer. The sales team simply need to log on to receive a complete, real time picture of sales leads, opportunities, contacts, accounts and much more. "We have a total history of every customer relationship since that relationship was established," says Duffy. "We know who is working on which opportunity, the status, the forecasted conversion time and the pipeline of future revenue."

MeetingZone is also using the integrated web to leads functionality to automate the capture and assignment of sales leads. When a prospect registers an enquiry on the MeetingZone website, all of the details are immediately captured in Salesforce for immediate follow-up.

Tight integration with a bespoke customer services database also allows customers to report issues and problems via the web. MeetingZone's technical teams simply log in, review the case and use the comprehensive view of the customer situation and products deployed there to speedily identify, remedy and close the case.

It's no coincidence that MeetingZone has been using Salesforce since its foundation and during that period the company has almost doubled its revenue year on year. Duffy explains the reason behind this:

"Salesforce allows us to automate every corner of the organization: from providing custom templates concerning sales offers for our salesmen to send out to customers, to introducing automated event registration. We ruthlessly automate as much as possible in the organization. This way, we have been able to penetrate more accounts using a highly productive and efficient sales methodology. Salesforce is without doubt the most valuable system we use in the organization."

MeetingZone