“Ultimately, any new technology, tool or process will be measured by results. While we have had a high growth rate for some time, in our first three months since implementing SalesNexus, it has more than paid for itself.”

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“SalesNexus became the clear leader for exploration, both from feature, price, and simplicity advantages.”

DesignFacilitator is a growing software-as-a-service business, providing project-based firms a Client Feedback Tool to collect, manage, and distribute feedback from project participants throughout project delivery. Recent growth (300% annual increase) mandated a more professional approach to our sales tools and process than what we had been using.

The Challenge

As a bootstrap startup employing several developers, we built our own “CRM” tool based on an open-source bug-tracking software we employed with our development team. While this was effective enough in our early days, our needs soon outstripped the basic capabilities of this repurposed tool.

We began a needs analysis process to determine what tools we really needed. We wanted to consolidate several disparate systems into one, and have a single source for our sales, marketing, and support efforts.

We maintained a very large database (55k records) in an online email marketing database, through which we provided weekly newsletters for our subscribers. Separately, we had over 4K records in our CRM system, as these were our active “leads” we were pursuing. Demonstrations were logged via our GoToMeeting administration tool. As leads turned into opportunities, we tracked proposals with a folder in our filesystem, where all proposals lived as PDF’s using a designated naming convention. Sales were tracked in a dedicated Excel file, with duplicate information in our accounting system. We employed a second spreadsheet to track post-sale training, implementation, and useage of our software. And everything else (as 50% of this never got documented) lived in Outlook as an email or calendar item. And with all this – we had no reporting mechanism.

We piloted Salesforce.com, as it is an industry leader in online CRM. We found the tools to be too complex and not easily customized for our needs. They also failed to integrate our email marketing – one of our key sources of lead generation. We explored Act and Goldmine, but both proved expensive and complicated to install and configure – limiting availability of an anytime/anywhere solution.

SalesNexus then became the clear leader for exploration, both from feature, price, and simplicity advantages. After reaching out to SalesNexus to learn more, we received a targeted demonstration that clearly responded to our needs, and identified how the solution would simpilfy our life while creating a more effective salesforce.

The Solution

After agreeing to proceed, we engaged SalesNexus to spend a day onsite with us for hands-on training and more indepth customization. This very cost-effective strategy was pivotal in our abilty to jumpstart use of the new tool. We learned a lot about ourselves, changed many of our processes along the way, and documented a best path forward to get the most out of the tools. The SN team on the back-end took our various sources of data and imported everything, consolidating lists and organizing the results into a single, effective list.

We later hired a temp to spend a week weeding through other sources of data to finalize the results and assure we had absolutely everything in one place, for easy access. This was not critical (in fact, we did this three months after SN was in production) but proved very helpful.

The integrated email marketing and campaign automation proved to revolutionize our prospecting business. We are now able to easily identify the 50-100 new people who interact with our message – even if they don’t directly respond to us. Timley “cold calls” have thus been very targeted and effective and converting curiosity into real interest.

Myself, I have never been a list maker. Yet the task-based system within SalesNexus is so incredibly easy to use, powerful, and flexible – I’ve now managed myself via the task list and have seen a marked improvement in my own production and follow-through. I spend only 10% of my time selling, as my role as Director of Operations is much more strategic – and yet I spend more time now in SalesNexus than almost any other tool. Whether it’s supporting customers, following-up to client requests, prospecting new business, aligning with partners – I can track and manage it all to completion with far less effort than before.

Managing my sales team has also become nearly automatic. I can instantly check on any salesperson, his pipeline, his leads, and see the entire stage of processes at a glance. I know who’s working, on what, and to what result. More importanlty – the sales team loves it too. They can engage me as an expert when needed, delegate tasks to me for follow-through, and collaborate post-sale to assure their deals are effectively transitioned into actively engaged customers.

Ultimately, any new technology, tool or process will be measured by results. While we have had a high growth rate for some time, in our first three months since implementing SalesNexus we observed a measurable increase in results. Already, SalesNexus has more than paid for itself. We have identified hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunities that fell through the cracks before; we have increased lead generation results by over 1000%, and have an overall happier, more satisfied, and more successful sales / marketing / support team.