Salesforce CRM helps Cambridge Bioscience achieve a ten-fold return on investment

Challenge

• Cambridge Bioscience is a distributor of life science products, marketing more than 100,000 products from 40 US suppliers to more than 15,000 researchers
• The company has grown quickly in the past few years and aims to double sales in the next three years
• It was using an old bespoke system that included internal hosting and Microsoft Access, which was slow, limited and difficult to use
• Cambridge Bioscience’s sales team and other workers were increasingly working outside the office and needed fast, reliable, anytime access to company data
   

Solution

• Cambridge Bioscience carried out a small-scale evaluation of Salesforce CRM Professional Edition and quickly decided it was the solution it needed. It took out an additional 16 licences
• After attending a local salesforce.com conference, and learning how other organisations were using Salesforce CRM, Cambridge Bioscience decided that it wanted to extend the capabilities of the Salesforce platform and upgraded to Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition
   

Results

• A combination of increased sales and cost savings (there was no need to invest in additional technology or staff) has seen Cambridge Bioscience achieve a ten-fold return on investment in Salesforce CRM
• The company has downloaded a number of applications from Force.com AppExchange including, the ExactTarget email marketing solution, and the DataTrim database cleaning solution
• Salesforce CRM is used for measuring performance in many areas including, marketing campaigns, and for tracking enquiries generated by Google AdWords
• Cambridge Bioscience has started integrating Salesforce CRM with external applications, such as Sage
• The company plans to use Salesforce CRM to integrate its product website, customer records and financial records 
• This integration will enable Cambridge Bioscience to offer clients new levels of service, including the ability to interact with their own profiles on the company website