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Spectacular Growth Drives CRM Overhaul
The Capital Management Group (CMG) of Wachovia Corporation is one of the fastest growing stars of the Charlotte, North Carolina-based financial services giant. Over the past five years, CMG has grown from $23 billion to $225 billion in assets, and now employs more than 13,500 associates spread across thousands of offices in 11 states. In 2000, the group's revenues topped $3.5 billion.
To maintain this spectacular growth rate, CMG sales reps needed to continue delivering premier support services to existing customers, while also swiftly identifying and pursuing any new opportunities that developed.
For years, the employees of CMG's Corporate and Institutional Services unit used a homegrown database to track and manage information. But the system was beginning to break down. Technically, it was outmoded and incompatible with other bank systems. More significantly, it wasn't flexible enough to adapt to even minor shifts in the bank's business goals or strategies.
"Any system is only as good as the business processes it supports," says John Shope, Senior Vice President and National Sales Director for Corporate and Institutional Services at Wachovia. "Our existing software simply wasn't capable of keeping up with the significant changes occurring within the financial services industry."
Because the original programmers of the system's database had long ago left the company, the bank contracted with an external consultant just to keep the aging system functioning. As the number of technical problems multiplied, the bank also hired a full-time administrator and a half-time assistant systems analyst to help maintain systems operations until a new solution could be implemented.
"We were in high-growth mode," recalls Shope. "Our sales team had more than tripled in size since the original system had been installed; we had sales representatives in fifteen states. We knew we needed something to help us remain competitive."
By the end of 2000, technical difficulties with the sales tracking system were so pervasive that even basic uploading and downloading of data was problematic. Remote employees had so much trouble updating the database that no one -- in sales or management--could be confident the data was accurate. In addition, a significant percentage of Wachovia's growth was fueled by acquisitions of other financial services firms, and the database was simply not robust enough to serve users scattered across a broad geographic territory.
The integrity of the system eventually became so compromised employees simply stopped using it for anything but recording the basic facts on deals they had successfully closed. Essentially, says Shope, this meant his sales team had no automated tools designed to actually help them to sell. "They were on their own, and so they were using everything from notepaper to post-it notes to individual PDA's to track contacts and sales leads," says Shope. "There was no contact management system, no daily activity planner, no mail-merge capabilities, no way to prioritize prospects, and certainly no way to share critical sales data with other sales reps or management."
Without a steady and reliable stream of customer data coming in from the field, management was unable accurately forecast sales or follow market trends that affected the bank's strategy plans - both immediate and long-term.
Salesforce.com Delivers Full-Featured CRM - Without Exorbitant Cash Outlays
Shope's first decision was that the database should be replaced with a full-featured CRM system. "Our goal was to find a better way to manage all aspects of the customer relationship-not just the sale," says Shope. "And if possible, I wanted to do this without exorbitant cash outlays."
Wachovia first considered traditional client-server CRM software packages. Not only were the price tags daunting, but Shope knew they represented just a fraction of what any client-server system would cost to install and maintain. "And, of course, it would be a very long time before we could hit the start button," he says.
An article in Fortune mentioned salesforce.com's online CRM solution, and Shope was impressed by the joint promises of quick implementation and low cost. "We were spending $70,000 to $80,000 a year on consultant fees just to keep the old system up and running," Shope says. "If we redirected these funds to the salesforce.com service, it would practically pay for itself."
Wachovia rolled out salesforce.com to two institutional sales teams in May 2001. The entire implementation process "from soup to nuts" took six weeks, and included customizing the service, mapping it to the unique demands and processes of the Corporate & Institutional sales group, and putting all affected employees through training.
"It was like a giant broom sweeping away bureaucracy and paperwork in order to allow opportunities to emerge," says Shope.
Outwitting Competitors With Superior Customer Insight
Today, says Shope, everything is "tremendously improved." "Now all of us have immediate access to all the information we could ever want." His sales reps are already saving 30-plus hours a month thanks to reduced data entry and administrative duties. This increased productivity is translating directly into more time spent with customers. "Salesforce.com helps us know where to focus our efforts," explains Shope. "We can now identify our most valuable customers, and we can focus on prospects most likely to yield large returns."
Shope is especially delighted that he now has a tool to coach his sales reps through real world customer situations as well as educate them on industry "best practices." "I can review notes from sales calls to see if they are hitting the right buttons of customers; I can follow the trail of communication for a particular prospect and help them execute effective follow-through strategies," says Shope. His team is already collaborating more, and coordinating their efforts when a large corporate prospect has a presence in more than one sales territory. For example, just weeks after implementing salesforce.com, one of Shope's sales reps heard of an opportunity for Wachovia to take over management of a defined contribution plan. "When we looked up the company record on salesforce.com, we realized that another Wachovia team was chasing that same account-only they were attempting to sell employee stock option processing services," recalls Shope.
The two sales teams got together, consolidated the two proposals, and, due to the resulting processing and cost efficiencies, were able to offer the entire bundle of services for an extremely competitive price. The deal was quickly closed. "The CFO of the client company told us we were the only ones smart enough to recognize the opportunity and deliver a solution which offered more value for the customer," says Shope. "Salesforce.com turned what could have ended up as an inter-department communication error into a significant new source of revenue."
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