Executive Networks Media

Salesforce has completely changed the way we do business. The more we use it, the more opportunities we see arising from it.”

Mark Hobson, CEO, Executive Networks Media
 

Salesforce delivers gold for Executive Networks Media: a single view of the customer

Executive Networks Media (ENM) is one of Asia’s big players in B2B IT publishing. Its advertising clients include tech behemoths like IBM and Microsoft, and its target audience encompasses some 84,000 C-level IT executives in major organisations across Asia.

To connect these vendors and IT buyers, ENM manages a stable of successful web and print publications, and maintains a busy events calendar. At the heart of all this activity lies a very important database.

“The real gold in our business is our database. Our ability to know who is working where, at what level and using which technologies is critical for us to do our job better,” said Mark Hobson, CEO, Executive Networks Media. Sales Cloud has enabled ENM to mine this gold.

The catalyst for change

Until recently, the ENM database was fragmented and ad-hoc. They used an old, unsupported CRM system, with much of the customer data captured in Excel. Data and business intelligence was lost at every turn.

“We had all this customer information stored on all sorts of Excel spreadsheets, with multiple databases across multiple locations. It simply wasn’t working anymore – it placed a huge strain on our resources and became completely unviable,” said Hobson

Enter Salesforce1 Sales Cloud

A management buyout of the business in August 2013 (ENM was previously owned by Fairfax) presented a great opportunity to invest in a new CRM system.

Having already trialed Sales Cloud with one user within the organisation, the new management team was confident that it would deliver the holy grail of CRM – the single view of the customer. Aided by NAIT Consulting, Sales Cloud was installed at ENM.

Immediate results

“We started seeing the benefits of Sales Cloud within two weeks of implementation,” said Hobson. “Suddenly, we had clear visibility across the sales team and its pipeline – we could see how many calls each salesperson was making, and what proposals they were sending out.”

With Sales Cloud, ENM now enjoys:

  • Instantaneous visibility into customer interactions – which holds the sales team more accountable and opens the door to new opportunities
  • Stronger targeting – the telemarketing team can slice the data to extract a call list that is not only based on a specific industry or job function, for example, but they can segment down to a few hundred people who do a specific task
  • More direct editorial – the journalists can approach users of specific technologies to get direct insights and commentary

“Sales Cloud has turned us into a very database-driven company. We can slice and dice the data in all sorts of ways to help the various teams in our business – from editorial to events – and we are becoming incredibly specific and targeted in our reach-out to customers,” Hobson said.

“We are now thinking laterally and using the rich information we have available to identify new products – be they events, websites or something else entirely. This single view of the customer is quite literally the best thing to ever happen to our business.”

 
 

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