Mahr Increases Sales Productivity 50 to 90% in Nine Months Using Salesforce

As a leading global provider of measuring instruments, pumps, and bearings, Mahr Group was challenged with understanding customer needs in scores of sales territories worldwide. A historical reliance on separate, fragmented sales and customer service systems meant that each territory had its own unique approach to managing customer relationships—to the detriment of sales effectiveness. By standardizing on Salesforce worldwide, Mahr has created a unified view of its customers and increased sales productivity by up to 90 percent in nine months in some territories. It took on average only five days to roll out Salesforce in each territory, and system customization using AppExchange Builder can be completed in only a few hours.

Mahr is a medium-sized global organization associated with industrial metrology, quality, and innovation. Besides the manufacture of measuring instruments used for testing workpiece geometry, the company also produces high-precision gear metering pumps and highly accurate rotary stroke bearings as a universal component in mechanical systems. Mahr's key customers include the automotive industry, the mechanical engineering sector, providers of precision technology, and synthetic fibers manufacturers. Mahr employs almost 1,500 staff worldwide and during 2004 recorded revenues of $170 million.

The precision that Mahr uses in its manufacturing processes is reflected in the precision it puts into customer relationships. Quality and reliability are the hallmarks of Mahr, and the company is committed to delivering consistent, world-class sales and service in all its operating territories worldwide. Until recently though, Mahr was relying on a wide range of different and fragmented sales information systems to manage customer relationships. Some countries were using an ACT! system to target, acquire, and service customers; others were using an Applix business performance management system; some just used spreadsheets; whereas for others, paper-based systems were sufficient. Every territory operated its own sales methodology—the result being that it was difficult for sales teams to effectively target customers at a country level and even more difficult for management to secure a holistic view of the company's sales position at a country, regional, and global level.

Insight into Global Sales Performance

"Our headquarters in Germany had only minimal insight into the company's global performance," explains Christian Hofmeister, head of customer care for Mahr in Goettingen, Germany. "If we wanted to understand the sales volumes for a particular customer that we service in multiple countries, we ended up receiving multiple, separate sets of figures from the countries. We then needed to examine these and manually combine them to obtain a global view. The disconnected approach wasn't a very effective means of managing customer relationships."

Mahr saw the light first in the United States, where the company made the strategic decision to replace its Applix system with Salesforce. As Hofmeister explains, "Our U.S. colleagues were bowled over by the depth of functionality of Salesforce, its ease-of-use, and the rapid deployment capability. The hosted customer relationship management (CRM) application means the system is cost-effective to deploy and operate, and salesforce.com has a mature, respected pedigree in the CRM market."

This decision was quickly followed by up to 13 other Mahr territories in Europe and Asia, including the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, China, and Brazil. Germany—t he home territory—will follow soon. Hofmeister was astounded at the speed of deployment. "We started off with the U.K. and steadily worked through each territory. On average, it took only five days to deploy Salesforce in each territory, migrate the data, train the staff, and get them productive on the Salesforce system."

Single, Comprehensive View of the Customer

Today, 125 Mahr field sales and customer care professionals rely on Salesforce to deliver a single, comprehensive view of the customer. Each of these individuals shares a unified view of leads, opportunities, and accounts. They have access to a complete product catalog and sales and marketing collateral, together with the Mahr assets deployed at a customer site. Sales managers worldwide now have unrivalled visibility into the activities of their representatives and the status of their pipelines. And integrated activity management means that customer care teams can undertake fast, effective, and rewarding case management.

"Our sales teams love Salesforce," says Hofmeister. "As soon as a lead has been identified, we capture all the details surrounding it and assign it to a sales team. There's only one system to use, no data is ever lost, and the sales teams are immediately active on the lead—tracking the situation and moving the opportunity closer and closer to a sales deal. On average, each sales territory using Salesforce has increased its sales productivity by 50 percent in nine months. In some territories that used to rely on paper-based processes, we are experiencing a 90 percent increase in sales productivity during the same period. Mahr has definitely increased its sales effectiveness using Salesforce."

The system is by no means static either. Hofmeister has tailored the system to meet their unique international sales needs, using the remarkable point-and-click customization functionality of AppExchange Builder. "Every country has its own demands, and you can't shoehorn one common CRM system on everyone. Customizing CRM used to be a headache—but not with AppExchange. We've been able to add territory-specific sales-booking systems, links to other systems, and unique identifiers to highlight the factory where the Mahr instrument was manufactured. Each of these customization steps only takes a few hours and our sales teams benefit form a more effective and rewarding sales system," Hofmeister says.

He concludes, "We are the third-largest company in the world for dimensional metrology, and we export approximately 60 percent of our output. To consolidate this position and continue to provide unrivalled sales effectiveness and high quality support, we need to understand every aspect of each customer relationship worldwide. Salesforce does that for us."

Mahr