Deyta Saves Hours Each Week with Easy Reporting Capabilities from Salesforce

"We needed to get a complete solution in place quickly and at a low cost. Team Edition was a perfect fit for us. It was the best valued solution available, it met our functional needs, and our entire sales team was up and running in just one day."

Overview
Challenge
  • Deyta's sales team and management were unhappy with the stand-alone contact managers—GoldMine and ACT!—they had been using. Sales wanted a more user-friendly solution that would let them share customer and sales information, and management needed faster and easier insight into the sales pipeline.
Solution
  • In one day and with no support from IT, Deyta implemented Team Edition. The intuitive solution required little training, and the sales team and management love having anytime, anywhere access to real-time, shared information.
Results
  • The productivity gains Deyta has experienced with Salesforce have been tremendous. Weekly reporting that used to take hours can be done in seconds. And salespeople are able to work more collaboratively and efficiently than ever before.
Full Story

Contact Management Performance Not Up to Par

Deyta's specialty is performance management. With its exclusive, proprietary Factual Foresight System, Deyta, Inc. collects, interprets, and analyzes information about organizations and their customers to help improve performance and the bottom line. Factual Foresight is at work for a variety of organizations in industries including healthcare, human services, financial services, and higher education.

As Deyta continued to grow its successful business, each member of the company's five-person sales team was managing his own customer contacts, pipelines, and sales activities by using contact management software installed on their individual computers. "None of us were very proficient ACT! or GoldMine users, primarily because these software packages are just too cumbersome to use," explains J. Kevin Porter, CFO at Deyta. With ACT! and GoldMine, the sales team and management were frustrated by their inability to easily customize reports or the application. Deyta's IT group didn't have the bandwidth that customizing the software on each individual salesperson's computer would require.

Data sharing and reporting were also a headache. "The problem with solutions like ACT! and GoldMine has always been the same—there's no easy way to share data among sales reps and sales management," says Porter. "We have a collaborative selling process at Deyta. In order to be effective, each sales rep needs to know what the others are doing."

Lacking a single repository of all customer information not only made it difficult for salespeople to work together, but Deyta's management also was not able to get much-needed visibility into the sales pipeline without a very time- and labor-intensive process. "I used to spend hours each week collecting and collating data to get an overview of the pipeline," says Porter. "And by the time I put everything together, the information was already out of date. We had no ability to share and report on data in real time."

Team Edition Provides Fast Relief

Deyta turned to Team Edition for better management of the company's sales and customer information. "We needed to get a complete solution in place quickly and at a low cost. Team Edition was a perfect fit for us," says Porter. "It was the best-valued solution available, it met our functional needs, and our entire sales team was up and running in just one day."

Deyta's sales team has found that Salesforce is much more intuitive than ACT! or GoldMine and requires less training. And when they do need help, the team has been pleased with the availability of salesforce.com's customer support. "Our salespeople have really taken to Salesforce," Porter says. "We're very pleased with the improvements that we have seen in our sales process while using Team Edition."

The superior usability and fast implementation of Team Edition has made the transition very smooth and easy. "Not needing to involve our over-taxed IT group in the implementation was another big plus of the Salesforce solution," explains Porter. "We were literally able to just turn on Salesforce and get up and running on our own."

Deyta Experiences Real-Time Sales Insight

For the first time, Deyta is able to share data and get anytime, anywhere access to their sales information. Deyta has seen significant productivity gains using Team Edition, now that the sales team can work together more efficiently and with real-time data anywhere they have an Internet connection. Even when they will be away from the Internet, Deyta's sales team can synchronize their PDAs with Salesforce so that their most recent customer information is always at their fingertips, even when on an airplane or in a customer's lobby.

In addition, the days of laboriously compiling sales data exported from each salesperson's individual contact manager are long gone. "Now I can log into Salesforce, go straight to one of the custom reports I created myself, and get the up-to-the-minute information I need in just a few seconds," Porter says. "It's saving me hours each week, and I have more accurate and recent data. Salesforce gives us much better insight into our sales process."

Porter is also secure in the knowledge that Salesforce has the flexibility to grow along with his business. "Someday, we see ourselves growing to the point where we will want to upgrade to either Professional Edition or Enterprise Edition," says Porter. "For now Team Edition is the right answer for Deyta. But it's comforting to know that when we do decide to upgrade, the transition will be quick and seamless."


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