Irish-owned global cloud computing consultancy Saaspoint has implemented Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud 2 CRM for software testing provider SQS Group.
The programme was completed across seven countries within 40 working days and also includes training and support.
“Thanks to Saaspoint, implementation was completed ahead of schedule and ahead of budget,” said Phil Codd, managing director of SQS Ireland, who has sales responsibility for the Northern European region, as well as India and South Africa.
SQS Group employs 80 people in Ireland and about 1,700 globally. It reorganised its European operations into two regions in 2010.
“Up until then, sales reporting had been on an individual country basis. This involved a complex web of spreadsheets, emails and word of mouth,” said Codd.
“Like many of our clients, SQS needed a CRM solution quickly to take advantage of the recovery in global markets,” said John Appleby, CEO of Saaspoint.
“Like the rest of the technology sector, it was coming out of a challenging 2009 so budget was also an important issue.”
After reviewing the market, SQS rejected an on-premise solution because of lengthy implementation time and a high cost.
“We selected Saaspoint as our implementation partner because of its cloud computing experience, the quality of its people and its global track record in deploying cloud computing across 700 organisations,” said Codd.
What Sales Cloud 2 does
SQS chose Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud 2, which helps manage accounts, contacts, leads, marketing, opportunities, quotes, content library, analytics and forecasting.
Customers also have access to Chatter, Salesforce’s enterprise collaboration tool which uses social media principles.
“We now have a central repository of our sales leads and pipeline. Not only is this information available to us in real time but we have cut the administration cost of providing it by at least 25pc,” said Codd.
Codd also notes that forecasting has improved and has extended their visibility out into two quarters. He also expects to push this out to three quarters, thanks to the quality of the data.
SQS has started to generate real sales and revenue benefit, finding that events are better targeted and more cost effective.
Saaspoint has also made Sales Cloud available to SQS on mobile devices, such as iPhone and BlackBerry.
“Working with Saaspoint has been a great experience. They have more than delivered and our sales process and customer responsiveness is much the stronger for it,” said Codd.
“We are now really well positioned to fully take advantage of any upturn in the market which we have identified since the first quarter.”
