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• Replace existing Act database
• Cope with data growth arising from increased portfolio of clients and services
• Improve reporting and forecasting
• Increase sales productivity

• As one of Ireland’s fastest growing provider of Managed IP Services and Broadband connectivity, Strencom swapped-out an Act database for Salesforce. In only five months, sales have risen by 20 percent and sales productivity has increased by more than 30 percent.

• Powerful forecasting provided instant, detailed, dashboard view of the sales pipeline
• Helped increased revenues by 20 percent in five months
• Enabled the sales team on average to devote up to 40 percent more time to selling, as opposed to administration
• Provided the team with a complete, consolidated view of the sales situation at any time
• Enabled the company to customize multiple records, tabs, workflows, fields and other areas themselves—each phase only takes a couple of hours

Concerned by the lack of scalability and functionality of its existing Act database, leading Irish Managed IP Services and Broadband connectivity provider Strencom swapped it for Salesforce. It proved to be a canny decision. Since launching the system five months ago, sales have risen by 20 percent and sales productivity has increased by more than 30 percent. The responsiveness and quality of support case management has improved and the Strencom team is customizing the multi-tenant CRM system almost at will.

One of Ireland's fastest growing hosting and data connectivity companies

Strencom is one of Ireland's leading and fastest growing providers of Managed IP Services and Broadband connectivity. The company offers two data centers and network presence in locations such as Dublin, Cork, Shannon and London. Its services include managed hosting and co-location, broadband, wide area networks, leased lines and online data security and back up.

Established in 1999, Strencom has experienced relentless growth and is ranked in the Deloitte Technology Fast Growth 50 companies for Ireland, as well as being ranked in the Deloitte Fast 500 for EMEA. Shortly after the company was formed, Managing Director Tim Murphy brought in an Act system to help capture and store customer data. It ended up being used primarily as an address book for contacts and for some of the sales function, and as time went by and Strencom grew, more customized fields were needed to cope with the expanding customer information and workflow patterns. At this point, it became apparent that the Act system was out of its depth, as Murphy explains.

"In the last 18 months, we have doubled sales and the number of staff," he says. "With so much data in the system, Act began to run slower and slower. We thought about running it on a dedicated server to tackle this, but the problem ran deeper than that. We have three hundred clients in the business, public sector and reseller markets—and thousands of products to support. Our concern was that the Act system would not scale to cope with this growing demand for data. It also lacked the functionality and flexibility we needed moving forward."

Flexibility, scalability and low total cost of ownership

A visit to the salesforce.com website—and consensus that this multi-tenant customer relationship management (CRM) system had the flexibility, scalability and low total cost of ownership Strencom was looking for—convinced Murphy to take up the free one month trial. It didn't take long for him to find out just how useful the system could be, as the following example demonstrates.

"Over a year ago, when we were still using Act, we had a prospect who had been let down by another service provider. They contacted us and we loaded all their details into Act. We added in the probability of sale, tasks and other data surrounding the opportunity. Eventually, the prospect contacted us to say they had resolved the problem with their own provider and would keep using their services, but asked us to call them in one year. When we began using Salesforce, I loaded the lead into Salesforce and scheduled a call at the appropriate time for when they had asked me to contact them. Salesforce alerted me to the time I was due to contact them and I had all the details to hand to make the call. The prospect said they had literally just been let down again by their other vendor. Because of the automated follow-up in Salesforce, we closed the business."

Today, nine staff in the company are using Salesforce SFA for lead, opportunity and account management and forecasting. Once a sale is closed, the order is sent via automated workflow for the project management teams to implement—again using Salesforce. The solution is also used to manage after-sales case management enquiries. "We're an ISP so we can see the value in a hosted multi-tenant CRM system. For a fixed monthly fee, we have some-one else taking care of the CRM system, while we concentrate on doing what we do best: selling and managing hosting and data connectivity." says Murphy.

Increased business agility

Murphy is impressed by the business agility that Salesforce lends to the company's operations. "I put a new order into Salesforce last Friday," he says. "Within an hour I could see on the screen that the implementation team had already done all the order management. I didn't need to call them or brief them. All the information was already there for them to use. Forecasting has also been transformed. In our industry we operate on an average 12 week lead time between contract signature and a system going live. The powerful forecasting in Salesforce means we have an instant, detailed, dashboard view of the sales pipeline over each sales cycle. With Act, the reporting was extremely basic."

The highlights of Salesforce for Strencom? Murphy says that revenues have risen 20 percent since Salesforce was introduced and that the CRM system is a main driver for that increase in sales. His sales team is on average able to devote up to 40 percent more time to selling, as opposed to administration. And the team now has a complete, consolidated view of the sales situation at any time.

This wave of benefits doesn't even include the ease of customization. "When we first looked at Salesforce, there were a number of customer case studies on their website saying how easy Salesforce was to adapt and to customize. To be honest, we were skeptical, imagining that customization was only the domain of enterprise customers with large in-house development teams. How wrong we were! It couldn't be easier. We've customized multiple records, tabs, workflows, fields and other areas to meet the special needs of Strencom. We do it all ourselves and each phase only takes a couple of hours."