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• DecisionOne needed a centralized, easy-to-use CRM solution to facilitate collaboration among virtual account teams, improve the accuracy of its forecasting, and enable real-time insight into critical sales data. This solution needed to be implemented rapidly and inexpensively without burdening DecisionOne's IT department.

• Leveraging salesforce.com's professional services team, DecisionOne designed and deployed Enterprise Edition in less than a month, selecting the on-demand CRM solution over traditional application providers such as Siebel, SAP, and others.

• Within months, DecisionOne experienced bottom-line benefits such as increases in new business win rates, renewal rates, and average deal size in addition to substantial cost savings, all of which combined to produce an amazing first-year ROI calculation of more than 1150%. In addition, forecast visibility and accuracy has improved, and the company has much greater insight into its sales process and customers.

Need for Collaboration and Forecasting Prompts CRM Search

With more than 4,000 employees, an extensive, geographically distributed network of service locations, and its comprehensive OneSource solutions, DecisionOne provides the coverage, availability, and response to satisfy the technology support needs of its clients' employees and their customers.

In 2002, the company implemented a new customer engagement model designed to deliver higher customer value and service through the creation of virtual account teams. For optimal success, the distributed teams would need to work effectively together in a common customer system. The old process involved using legacy systems and other non-integrated, manual tools such as Microsoft Excel, making it challenging and time consuming to get accurate and up-to-date revenue forecasts and other critical metrics.

DecisionOne decided it needed a single, centralized CRM solution that its sales, marketing, and sales support teams could use to maintain and share customer and prospect information in real time. The company also valued accessibility and ease of use to ensure that its virtual account teams could easily collaborate to provide top-notch service.

"We needed an online CRM solution that delivered immediate benefit to our sales team without the barriers characteristic of traditional CRM products such as high costs, long implementations, and unnecessarily complex designs," explains Frank Tait, vice president of marketing for DecisionOne.

Customized and Deployed in under a Month

After considering solutions including Siebel, SAP, and GoldMine, DecisionOne selected salesforce.com's Enterprise Edition for its rapid, cost-effective deployment and mobile accessibility. The company standardized its North American sales operations on Salesforce, with 120 active users. Virtual account teams work collaboratively in Salesforce anywhere they have an Internet connection—in the office, at home, or on the road. For plane travel or other disconnected scenarios, salesforce.com Offline Edition helps salespeople stay productive all the time.

Implementing the system and training users was a quick and smooth process with the help of salesforce.com's Professional Services team. In less than a month, the system was tailored to match DecisionOne's opportunity and account management processes and deployed across North America, meeting the company's aggressive implementation timeline. A customized, online training curriculum enabled management and the sales team to get up to speed quickly.

DecisionOne now has a singular, company-wide view of its sales process, empowering its new virtual account teams to access information, collaborate, and respond to customer needs, all in real time. "Salesforce met all of our business success criteria and delivered much more than traditional CRM software ever could in such a short time period," says Tait.

Investment Recouped in Four Months; First-Year ROI: 1150%

The ability to drive real-time data throughout its operations generated immediate benefits for DecisionOne. The sales team increased its efficiency, and senior management has much greater insight into its customers and sales data, as well as a more accurate revenue forecast. Tait reports that management can now track high-level, real-time customer information and then drill down to explore more granular data such as baseline revenue by account or renewals by account.

"Thanks to the insight Salesforce provides into our pipeline and account relationships, we have substantially increased our win rates, renewal rates, and average deal size," says Tait. "Salesforce has been a major factor in DecisionOne's recent sales successes." In fact, the average size of DecisionOne's add-on deals with existing customers has more than doubled in the last year.

Even more amazing are DecisionOne's return on investment calculations for CRM. The company calculates its first year ROI with salesforce.com to be a whopping 1150 percent. "It's incredible—S alesforce has been bottom-line profitable in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars every month, and we recouped our initial investment in just four months," explains Tait. "Such a rapid ROI timeline would not have been possible with a lengthy software implementation."

As the ROI benefits continue to add up, DecisionOne is looking into integrating Salesforce with other internal systems including legacy databases and email through salesforce.com's Force.com platform.

"We were impressed when Salesforce not only met our aggressive timelines and objectives, but greatly exceeded them," says Tait. "We are looking forward to continuing to find ways to use Salesforce to help DecisionOne amass more sales success stories."