PREM Group Moves into the Premier Property League using Salesforce

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• Replace existing Act and Access databases
• Manage data growth arising from increased portfolio of clients and services
• Improve reporting and forecasting
• Increase sales productivity

• Leading Irish hotel specialist company deploys Salesforce and Force.com to orientate its business around the customer. The multi-tenant system—deployed to 20 staff—is unifying leads, accounts and contacts, while also providing fast and effective marketing campaign management.

• Played instrumental role in helping the company grow its portfolio of hotels, serviced apartments and offices
• Provided a flexible, fully functional CRM system for very little capital outlay
• Enabled the company to segment and target groups of customers with email campaigns quickly
• Allowed the company to grow unrestrained by the limitations of a sales system
• Enabled the company to quickly and easily customize the system and add fields, tabs and workflow in minutes
• Concentrated more time and energy on managing the company’s property portfolio—n ot on an IT system

It’s a simple fact of life: if hotel rooms or apartments are unoccupied, they’re not making money. This means that an organization marketing such properties needs a highly flexible system to manage sales leads, accounts and customer relationships. PREM Group is one such company. Following the deployment two years ago of the multi-tenant Salesforce system, the Group is effectively targeting, acquiring and managing customers. Sales are rising, productivity is up, and the users enjoy using the intuitive, browser-based system.

Operating hotels, serviced apartments and serviced offices

Established in 1996, PREM Group is a fully Irish owned company, primarily in the business of operating hotels, serviced apartments and serviced offices in Ireland, the UK and Europe. The company specializes in the management of hotels, offering a complete support solution for the hotel in need of marketing and operational assistance; operates fully serviced apartments in 13 locations around the UK and Ireland; and manages business centers under the brand ‘Premier Business Centers’.

PREM Group’s history is typical of many small, dynamic and fast growing organizations. When the company was still small, it was comfortable relying on separate systems to manage relationships with customers, including Access and Act databases. Growth though soon made this approach to customer relationship management untenable. The company found itself switching between systems in search of a single view of the customer and according to Phil Sweeney, Sales and Marketing Director, PREM Group, this undermined the company’s ability to deliver effective and efficient service.

“It used to take us up to 45 minutes to synchronize all the systems to understand the precise status on a customer relationship,” she says. “This meant for example that we might set an appointment up with a customer, only to find that one of our colleagues was separately chasing the customer at the same time for a meeting.”

Almost deafened by the noise in the market surrounding salesforce.com and the value of the multi-tenant CRM system, Sweeney and her team opted for the one month free trial. But not before she had spoken to one major competitor. “He flew over from the UK to visit us, wined and dined us, but we never saw him again!” she says. “Salesforce by comparison was just what we needed. For a fast growing organization like ours, we get all the benefits of a flexible, fully functional CRM system for very little capital outlay. We can customize it ourselves and don’t need to rely on a heavy-duty IT team to support it.”

An invaluable tool in managing our sales

PREM Group has deployed Salesforce SFA to twenty staff in Dublin to create a unified view of the individuals involved in reserving hotel rooms and fully serviced apartments—s uch as bookers and secretaries—as well as a single view of many of the end-user customers themselves. “Salesforce is an invaluable tool in managing our sales,” says Sweeney. “A PREM Group sales person would typically use the system to book and record the minutes from a meeting with a company or major tour operator. They have a single view of the history of the relationship, the key influencers and decision makers, plus a comprehensive suite of literature about each hotel or apartment which they can share with the customer. Once the customer wants to make a booking, our salesperson can send an email direct from Salesforce to the relevant hotel.”

Salesforce helps PREM Group support a broad portfolio of hotels, including more than eight Days Inns and Hotels in Ireland as well as hotels in the UK and Belgium. It also underpins the lease and operation of over 600 serviced apartments in Ireland and the UK. Sweeney adds, “We rely on Salesforce to target prospects with these and new venues. The clear and easy-to-use browser-based system can segment groups of customers very quickly. We can create a targeted email campaign to the recipients and review the results. We then refine each campaign afterwards and steadily improve our targeting effectiveness.”

Live for more than two years on Salesforce, PREM Group has been highly satisfied with the results. “One of the greatest advantages of Salesforce is that it grows with our business. There’s no clumsy adding of servers or other technology: we simply add on new users, or alternatively add on new leads and accounts. It’s also highly adaptive. The Force.com platform allows us to customize the system and add fields, tabs and workflow in minutes. That way we concentrate more time and energy on managing our property portfolio—not on an IT system.”

Salesforce is also instrumental in helping PREM Group cross-sell accommodation. When the Group acquires a new hotel, for example, an email is sent to customers notifying them of the new opportunity and the advantages of the accommodation. “PREM Group is conducting a major expansion program over the next year, creating a further 300 jobs. Salesforce is instrumental in helping PREM Group grow its portfolio of hotels, serviced apartments and offices,” says Sweeney.