Maporama International Identifies New Revenue Opportunities After Implementing Salesforce in 15 Days

"Choosing to work with salesforce.com was a double bonus for us: on the one hand, we have a CRM solution adapted to our needs that improves our business performance and productivity on a daily basis; and on the other hand, via AppExchange, we can reach a target that a direct and dispersed sales force such as ours would never have been able to achieve. This partnership with salesforce.com genuinely contributes to securing our international ambitions."

Overview
Challenge
  • To combine know-how and capitalize resources dispersed over seven different countries
  • To smooth interaction between the people within a networked organization
  • To have a flexible tool that is easy to implement for a small structure
  • To support rapid growth with a flexible solution
  • To maintain and develop service quality and contract renewal rates
Solution
  • Salesforce Enterprise Edition chosen in order to automate and optimize the company’s sales forces.
  • Salesforce SFA (Sales Force Automation) chosen to create a single and integrated view of prospects and customers on a global scale.
  • Became an AppExchange partner of salesforce.com to provide location-based services that are easy to integrate with any business application.
Results
  • Deployed in just 15 days
  • Immediately adopted by users
  • Considerable reduction in customer opportunity processing times
  • Increase in team productivity and customer service quality
  • Clearer performance assessment indicators
  • Increased visibility of the company’s offering for a target of almost 30,000 firms via the AppExchange platform
Full Story
Maporama International, the European leader in location-based services, supplies firms with solutions for pin-point real-time location of any fixed elements (sales points, customers, suppliers etc.) or mobile elements (vehicles, mobile teams etc.) using the most detailed and broadest mapping coverage on the market. Firms use these solutions supplied in ASP mode for their business, marketing and internal logistical needs and also to make their customers' lives easier. Set up in 2000, the company today boasts more than 500 customers, including L'Oréal, Shell, Europcar, Accor, Renault, Ikea, etc. The firm has customers in 23 countries and generates 73% of its turnover on the international stage.

Fast creation of a single customer view was essential

With a salesforce spread over seven countries working for a clientele of major international customers, Maporama International needed a solution providing each employee with access to an integrated, up-to-date and global view of each customer. "With our Outlook and Excel-based previous solution, it was difficult to manage our customer and prospect database in real time. This was especially due to multiple entries and painstaking data synchronization work between our sites", explains Dominique Grillet, CEO of Maporama International.

Without suitable tools, it was difficult for employees to find answers to everyday questions such as: what products does this customer buy and when? Which contracts are signed following which telesales campaign? How many times has this customer called customer support? What is the state of play concerning sales forecasts? Who handles this customer? How many times must you call the customer before they sign the contract? In which sectors are the best sales for my products? This list is far from exhaustive. "Not only was not having reliable answers to these recurring questions detrimental to team productivity and sales efficiency, it also exposed our customers to inconsistent or poorly coordinated service, with the risk of damaging satisfaction levels", continues Dominique Grillet. "It was vital to eliminate this risk if we wanted to maintain, against a background of strong growth, our contract renewal rate which at the time was already way above the business average".

Saleforce.com chosen for its flexible solution

Whilst crucial for the development of Maporama International, the desired CRM solution needed to be implemented speedily; the company wanted their teams to remain focused on their core activity rather than becoming involved in implementing new tools. After examining several offerings on the market, including a client-server proprietary system, Maporama International settled on the Salesforce Enterprise Edition on-demand CRM solution. "The salesforce.com solution was a clear winner because it met both our functional expectations and criteria for flexibility, performance, easy implementation and integration with our existing applications", underlines Dominique Grillet.

Furthermore, since they deliver their own products in ASP mode, Maporama International has a perfect grasp of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) type solution benefits: no equipment investment or license purchase required, fast implementation and easy empowerment, reduced maintenance costs, etc. "Both Salesforce.com and Maporama International have adopted the ASP model. This also shows that we share the same vision on what an enterprise application consists of and that we have the same requirement levels regarding the availability and security of the data we host for our respective customers", adds Dominique Grillet. "In addition to adopting Salesforce SFA applications, these shared values weighed heavily in the decision to make our technology available on the AppExchange marketplace".

A CRM project developed in just 15 days

Designed to suit the requirements of companies of any size and business, Salesforce Enterprise Edition allowed Maporama International to equip itself in just two weeks with a 360-degree CRM solution, incorporating the best practices and providing end-to-end support for managing sales as well as the most complex clients. 15 days were sufficient to integrate the salesforce.com solution within the firm’s sales organization, interface it with existing applications and allow end users to become familiar with the flexible and customizable ergonomics of their new tools.

Today with 30 users, Salesforce Enterprise Edition has become the backbone of Maporama International sales activity. The teams from the different sites and departments can now use in real time all the necessary information on customers and prospects for organizing day-to-day tasks, documenting tactical and strategic decisions, and monitoring their activity. "Response times are now much shorter and right from implementation of the solution, which was immediately adopted by the users, we observed a significant improvement in sales activity management", confirms Dominique Grillet.

Everyone from sales engineers to pre-sales staff, integration consultants, support engineers and more share this single customer view which smoothes interaction between all the employees and ensures consistent and coordinated account management, at all stages of the sales cycle and customer lifecycle. Thanks to this deployment and workflow automation, the company has streamlined and internationally standardized the management of complex customer operations, product line forecasting or turnover allocation.

AppExchange, an impressive international lever

Maporama is also one of the prime partners on the AppExchange, the salesforce.com on-demand application service platform. By providing its location and navigation services via this Web marketplace, Maporama International is in direct contact with the 29,800 companies that use salesforce.com solutions (approximately 646,000 users throughout the world, on 31st March 2006). "We soon noticed the advantages of AppExchange: its on-demand model is perfectly suited to distributing our online services and its subscription-based sales model meets the expectations of many customers", explains Dominique Grillet. Thanks to this offering, all the users of salesforce.com and the solutions available on AppExchange can swiftly add mapping functions to their applications. This allows them to locate their customers, generate route plans and export them to a PDA, check and clean up their address databases or even enhance support team scripts.


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