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by David Longworth - Thursday, 6th September 2007

We’ve been in business for three years, creating timber buildings for garden offices, guest accommodation, and children’s playrooms.

In many people’s eyes we just produce posh sheds. But when Mrs Smith from Rotherham calls in and we can access her complete customer history, she’s blown away.

It all started when I built a garden office myself, quit my job and set up the firm in 2003. To begin with, I hand-wrote all the customer information in books.

Then I moved to ACT, a sales management software package. But I hadn’t expected that we’d grow as fast as we did.

So we knew we either had to go down the traditional IT route – bring in an IT expert, deal with loads of hardware and file servers, manage data and so on – or find something else.

The difficulty was that the building contractors, electricians and sales guys were all physically disparate, some of them hundreds of miles away.

Of our 23 staff, only two are office-based. It was one of our customers who suggested we sign up to Salesforce.com’s customer management service for 28 days for free.

It’s an online service for managing sales and marketing activities, like email campaigns, lead tracking and sales forecasting.

Salesforce hosts the software themselves, so we can access it from anywhere over the Internet for a monthly fee. I was a bit worried about data security, but then I saw that huge organisations were using Salesforce.

So I was pretty sure it would be alright.

I’m not an IT expert – I just followed the instructions, and tipped the complete database out of ACT and into Salesforce. I sent a marketing email to 400 or 500 prospects, and within 20 minutes the first response came in.

It works the other way too – before Salesforce, it took us days from receiving an email to actually talking to the customer. Now it’s three or four minutes.

You can customise Salesforce to fit your company, but for the more complicated changes, you’ll want to go to a third-party expert.

We’ve got a superb reporting dashboard, built by a consultancy called Sofia Works. It shows the sales pipeline, and we can do forecasting and opportunity analysis.

If we’ve got £500,000 of sales in the next two months listed as over 80 per cent likely, we know that in six weeks’ time we’ll need a production workforce to handle that, and we start making enquiries.

There’s a six-to-eight-week delay there, so it’s a fine balancing act.

The dashboard also lets me see how much business is stuck and where. If we’ve got £1m of business at the quotation stage, I do a quick call round to get it cleared.

The Salesforce service costs £50 per month per subscriber – we’ve got 15 subscribers, so that’s £9,000 per year. By contrast, it would cost £30-40,000 to do this in-house – and the moment you’ve bought it, it’s depreciating. The dashboard, together with some ongoing consultancy work, cost us £20,000.

In the future, an agent will be able to use a PDA on the customer’s premises and select from over 100 different options for our buildings, based on size, electrics and so forth.

We’ll be able to automatically create a quotation before the guy’s even left the customer’s driveway.

This system will let us expand easily.

We’re going to recruit another 24 franchisees and agents over the next twelve
months and we can say to them: “Don’t worry about accounting, cash collection,
orders, quotations – just deal with the leads and selling.” And we won’t have many worries either.

Tags: managing sales, email campaigns, managing staff, sales team, technology in business, marketing, business advice, customer management,