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Sales Force Automation Case Study
Leading Internet Marketing Company Supports Global Sales with
Flexible Salesforce Solution
DoubleClick, the New York-based global Internet marketing technology
company, knows marketing and sales. And it knows hosted solutions. After
all, DoubleClick jumped into Internetbased marketing in 1996 as a pioneer
in digital multichannel marketing and sells its own suite of hosted solutions
for media planning and buying, campaign management, and ad
management and
serving. So when the company outgrew its SalesLogix solution in 2003,
salesforce.com, the leader in on-demand CRM, was a natural choice.
DoubleClick needed a solution its increasingly global staff could access
anytime, from anywhere, that could easily scale to grow with the company,
and
that allowed the company to merge sales, marketing, and customer service
and support databases to gain a unified view of its business.
Another key reason for selecting salesforce.com, however, was the extreme
flexibility of the platform underlying salesforce.com’s applications. Decision
makers knew they needed a solution that could adapt as quickly as their
business needs changed. Company executives were convinced
that salesforce.com’s Force.com customization and integration tools would
allow the company to easily tailor the solution as required.
“Our business changes quickly and constantly. New products, new markets,
and new strategies are business as usual,” says Nicole Widder, Salesforce
administrator for DoubleClick. “We selected Salesforce because we needed
a solution we could modify, customize, and extend to keep pace with
our expanding business.”
In line with the company’s rapid pace of change, the goal when DoubleClick
rolled out Salesforce SFA in 2003 was to deploy the solution quickly.
Keeping the implementation simple and focusing
on automating key sales processes helped DoubleClick do just that: More
than 250 users were up on the system in fewer than ten weeks.
Diverse Needs, Diverse Applications
As soon as users tapped into the power and flexibility of the solution,
requirements for customizations and extensions began rolling in.
Marketers in the European office, for example, wanted to ensure that
DoubleClick was the premier brand in the U.K., Germany, and France. A
key metric for measuring progress on that goal was mentions of
DoubleClick in the media. Plans to track details about press mentions such
as the source, products mentioned, and the tone (positive or negative)
soon materialized.
Within weeks, Widder worked through multiple iterations and deployed a
custom Salesforce application created with Force.com Builder. DoubleClick
offers marketing services to its customers, so the real payoff for the new
application materialized when specific account managers at DoubleClick
started using it to correlate customers’ and prospects’ media mentions,
multiplying the project’s ROI and demonstrating the power and flexibility of
the Force.com platform.
Another custom-built application tracks the progress of request for proposal
(RFP) responses. “A significant portion of our business comes from
responding to RFPs,” explains Widder. “Before we had this tool, no one was
managing the RFP process. There was no visibility into status, and our
proposals were being generated on an ad hoc basis with inconsistent
results.”
The RFP tracking tool brings discipline and visibility to the proposal
process, tracking the required resources, time expended, activities, and
milestones during the proposal’s development. This new custom object
augments the Salesforce opportunity object, and the proposal document
itself is also
stored within the tool. More important, because the RFP application is tied
to opportunities, DoubleClick now measures the results of proposal efforts
by the revenue they generate. This insight allows DoubleClick to make
optimized decisions about assigning resources to new RFPs, and the
company can feed best practices back into the proposal process.
One-Stop Shop, Created in Weeks with Minimal IT Resources
DoubleClick’s implementation of Salesforce has evolved into a one-stop
shop for sales representatives and other employees to access all the
information they need. The most recent addition to the implementation is a
Tools application.
“Before Tools, salespeople had to navigate to multiple systems to do their
jobs,” says Widder. “Tools pulls together access to all of the systems reps
need. They can check pricing and our rate cards, obtain deep account
intelligence through our data warehouse, collaborate with peers, track
cases through our legacy support system, plot accounts on Google maps,
and search the corporate knowledge base—all without leaving the
Salesforce environment.”
During its two years of use, DoubleClick has created countless
customizations and extensions— large and small—to Salesforce. Perhaps
the most impressive aspect of the company’s journey, however, is the fact
that a single Salesforce administrator implemented all of the customizations.
“Customization is very smooth,” says Widder. “We can turn around
requests for new capabilities
within days, which wasn’t the case prior to using Salesforce.”
More Innovation on the Way
The innovation is far from over. Up next is a new project management
application, inspired by a similar application available in salesforce.com’s
AppExchange marketplace, home of hundreds of prebuilt, preintegrated
applications created by salesforce.com customers, developers, and
partners.
Other innovations include a new solution for optimizing presales activities
and a deduplication application to help ensure clean customer data.
DoubleClick is also investigating AppExchange partner solutions for
managing commissions and partner relations and considering posting its
own products to the directory.
“Through all the customizations and extensions created with the Force.com
platform, Salesforce has become the universal system of record for our
customer information,” says Widder. “It is the venue we use for centralized
access to all of our customer-related systems.”
Leading Internet Marketing Company Supports Global Sales with
Flexible Salesforce Solution
DoubleClick, the New York-based global Internet marketing technology
company, knows marketing and sales. And it knows hosted solutions. After
all, DoubleClick jumped into Internetbased marketing in 1996 as a pioneer
in digital multichannel marketing and sells its own suite of hosted solutions
for media planning and buying, campaign management, and ad
management and
serving. So when the company outgrew its SalesLogix solution in 2003,
salesforce.com, the leader in on-demand CRM, was a natural choice.
DoubleClick needed a solution its increasingly global staff could access
anytime, from anywhere, that could easily scale to grow with the company,
and
that allowed the company to merge sales, marketing, and customer service
and support databases to gain a unified view of its business.
Another key reason for selecting salesforce.com, however, was the extreme
flexibility of the platform underlying salesforce.com’s applications. Decision
makers knew they needed a solution that could adapt as quickly as their
business needs changed. Company executives were convinced
that salesforce.com’s Force.com customization and integration tools would
allow the company to easily tailor the solution as required.
“Our business changes quickly and constantly. New products, new markets,
and new strategies are business as usual,” says Nicole Widder, Salesforce
administrator for DoubleClick. “We selected Salesforce because we needed
a solution we could modify, customize, and extend to keep pace with
our expanding business.”
In line with the company’s rapid pace of change, the goal when DoubleClick
rolled out Salesforce SFA in 2003 was to deploy the solution quickly.
Keeping the implementation simple and focusing
on automating key sales processes helped DoubleClick do just that: More
than 250 users were up on the system in fewer than ten weeks.
Diverse Needs, Diverse Applications
As soon as users tapped into the power and flexibility of the solution,
requirements for customizations and extensions began rolling in.
Marketers in the European office, for example, wanted to ensure that
DoubleClick was the premier brand in the U.K., Germany, and France. A
key metric for measuring progress on that goal was mentions of
DoubleClick in the media. Plans to track details about press mentions such
as the source, products mentioned, and the tone (positive or negative)
soon materialized.
Within weeks, Widder worked through multiple iterations and deployed a
custom Salesforce application created with Force.com Builder. DoubleClick
offers marketing services to its customers, so the real payoff for the new
application materialized when specific account managers at DoubleClick
started using it to correlate customers’ and prospects’ media mentions,
multiplying the project’s ROI and demonstrating the power and flexibility of
the Force.com platform.
Another custom-built application tracks the progress of request for proposal
(RFP) responses. “A significant portion of our business comes from
responding to RFPs,” explains Widder. “Before we had this tool, no one was
managing the RFP process. There was no visibility into status, and our
proposals were being generated on an ad hoc basis with inconsistent
results.”
The RFP tracking tool brings discipline and visibility to the proposal
process, tracking the required resources, time expended, activities, and
milestones during the proposal’s development. This new custom object
augments the Salesforce opportunity object, and the proposal document
itself is also
stored within the tool. More important, because the RFP application is tied
to opportunities, DoubleClick now measures the results of proposal efforts
by the revenue they generate. This insight allows DoubleClick to make
optimized decisions about assigning resources to new RFPs, and the
company can feed best practices back into the proposal process.
One-Stop Shop, Created in Weeks with Minimal IT Resources
DoubleClick’s implementation of Salesforce has evolved into a one-stop
shop for sales representatives and other employees to access all the
information they need. The most recent addition to the implementation is a
Tools application.
“Before Tools, salespeople had to navigate to multiple systems to do their
jobs,” says Widder. “Tools pulls together access to all of the systems reps
need. They can check pricing and our rate cards, obtain deep account
intelligence through our data warehouse, collaborate with peers, track
cases through our legacy support system, plot accounts on Google maps,
and search the corporate knowledge base—all without leaving the
Salesforce environment.”
During its two years of use, DoubleClick has created countless
customizations and extensions— large and small—to Salesforce. Perhaps
the most impressive aspect of the company’s journey, however, is the fact
that a single Salesforce administrator implemented all of the customizations.
“Customization is very smooth,” says Widder. “We can turn around
requests for new capabilities
within days, which wasn’t the case prior to using Salesforce.”
More Innovation on the Way
The innovation is far from over. Up next is a new project management
application, inspired by a similar application available in salesforce.com’s
AppExchange marketplace, home of hundreds of prebuilt, preintegrated
applications created by salesforce.com customers, developers, and
partners.
Other innovations include a new solution for optimizing presales activities
and a deduplication application to help ensure clean customer data.
DoubleClick is also investigating AppExchange partner solutions for
managing commissions and partner relations and considering posting its
own products to the directory.
“Through all the customizations and extensions created with the Force.com
platform, Salesforce has become the universal system of record for our
customer information,” says Widder. “It is the venue we use for centralized
access to all of our customer-related systems.”