Improved Pipeline Visibility Helps O2 Close More Business

Challenge

• O2, a leading communications provider headquartered in the U.K., was challenged to accelerate sales growth in a tightly competitive environment.
• The company needed to improve sales productivity, enable collaborative team selling, and fundamentally make its sales teams more effective, including improving pipeline management and forecasting visibility.
• O2 required a sales system that could be deployed quickly, with minimal complexity and risk to the business.
• Based on the existing Oracle Online system, sales and marketing worked from different sets of data and their efforts were not totally aligned.
  
   

Solution

• O2 chose Salesforce CRM based on ease of use, functionality, and the maturity and experience of salesforce.com in the market.  The implementation was completed in three months, including training and certification.
• The company uses the cloud computing solution to provide an integrated suite of real-time, customized dashboard measurements, including sales pipeline, opportunities, lead conversion rates, and appointments. 
• Salesforce CRM Mobile provides sales teams with business applications and customer data on the move.  It required minimal training and allows them to view Salesforce CRM data and custom applications created on the mobile devices.
• O2 deployed Salesforce CRM to 250 sales and marketing professionals to create a single, unified view of business customers.

Results

• By improving sales information visibility, O2 is closing more business using Salesforce CRM.
• By providing sales management with detailed reports into the performance of their sales teams, Salesforce CRM is an important facet of sales coaching and one-to-one training sessions.  
• The intuitive, easy of use, multi-tenant Salesforce CRM system has played a key role in increasing sales productivity.
• Salesforce CRM lets O2 instantly segment different groups of customers according to multiple criteria, such as their value to the company, geography, and sales history.
• The ability to log calls, emails, and appointments in the field using Salesforce CRM Mobile while also viewing account, contact, and opportunity information, has increased sales productivity and sales effectiveness 
• Looking ahead, O2 will use Force.com to customize Salesforce CRM and include functions such as a deal calculator--which will allow the team to see the overall value of a deal--and a customized contract system.  O2 are also evaluating the deployment of Salesforce CRM Partners.