Case Study: SOLCORP - Real-time Access to Global Sales Information

"In an enterprise environment like ours, we have a good handle on our target markets and who is managing specific accounts -- the challenge is unifying our sales approach with the key pieces of information behind these accounts. By using Salesnet to manage our worldwide sales efforts, we've tied together all the moving parts. Sales, delivery, finance, and executive management all have real-time access to revenue forecasts, sales process activities, call reports, contact data, proposals, account strategies, and opportunity plans. Salesnet gives us previously unmatched visibility into our business activities."
- Blair Goulet, Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing

Customer Name
SOLCORP, www.solcorp.com

Industry
Software and Services, Financial Services

Business Description
SOLCORP, a wholly owned subsidiary of EDS, is a global leader in software solutions and services for the life insurance and wealth management industries. SOLCORP solutions help customers reduce their total cost of administration, accelerate the introduction of new products to the market, and streamline infrastructure through the migration and consolidation of existing products.

Challenge
SOLCORP has a reputation for providing solutions that meet the demands of a rapidly changing international marketplace. And, just as its customers must update and evolve how they conduct business, SOLCORP found itself in a similar position during April 2003.

SOLCORP's sales organization delivered enterprise software sales with top-tier global financial services companies and needed a more fluid and centralized system for managing these large-scale accounts. The company was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track account activities, manage territories, and generally guide performance. Much of the tasks associated with reporting and forecasting for the sales organization was done manually. Additionally, core sales data was dispersed over different databases, making it extremely challenging to gather real-time reports to accurately view current performance and historical trends. SOLCORP was ready to move out of Excel and into a scalable solution that could deliver on-demand access, while also fully supporting its homegrown sales processes.

The Salesnet Difference
Blair Goulet, Senior Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing at SOLCORP, led the company's effort to seek an appropriate solution for its sales challenges. Over the course of his career, Goulet had experience working with a variety of on-premise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools. Because his sales organization is worldwide, Goulet desired a hosted CRM solution for the ease of real-time access to critical sales data. The solution needed to also be flexible enough to fully support the proven best practices that he and his team had defined in selling to enterprise-class accounts, like Great-West Life Assurance Company and Citigroup.

During his past professional research on CRM, Goulet had become familiar with Salesnet and was keen on moving forward with a deployment because of the applications' uniqueness in two areas: process-centric capabilities and activity-driven account tracking. Goulet realized that only Salesnet's on-demand CRM could be easily configured to reinforce the company's way of selling, but that he could also leverage core account management functionality to keep his finger on the pulse of the latest sales activities.

Salesnet's internal Business Solutions Group worked collaboratively with Goulet to jumpstart training of sales, sales support, and executive management. Salesnet's consultants also imported information from Excel into the Salesnet application and built SOLCORP's proprietary sales processes into the system. Within 60 days, SOLCORP's global sales organization was trained and fully using Salesnet.

Results

	Real-time access to global sales information.
	Ability to predict business with a higher degree of accuracy.
	Scalable, repeatable workflow and process management offers consistency of operations and a tool to reinforce the required disciplines.
	A more streamlined and precise approach to tracking and managing territories, accounts, and opportunities.
	Centralized location for managing, reporting, and forecasting on all global sales activities.