“Infusion CRM has a revolutionary digital, interactive filing system that allows me to stay organized, follow up automatically and know who I need to bill, who has paid, and who I need to contact and why—and I never lose an email or any client-related detail.”

– My Wedding Film founder, Darby Schnepf

My Wedding Film is a small business with big ideas well-positioned in an explosively growing market: weddings. Based out of Arizona, My Wedding Film thrives on excellence in filming, editing, and customer relations. The company has grown through smart marketing and strong customer relations with so much success that their biggest lead source comes from referrals.

This unique business began using Infusion CRM soon after founder Darby Schnepf’s launched the company in 2001. Infusion CRM empowers Schnepf to manage the details of customer relationships almost effortlessly.

Through constant and diligent research and development they have created a “Wedding Film” so unique as to allow them to travel nationally and internationally to film weddings and events.

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Background
When Microsoft Canada unveiled Windows 2000 in April 1999, the beta version was ready to ship immediately but the final release was still months away. Using market research figures, Microsoft estimated that companies take an average of nine months to make a final decision about a software upgrade.

In order to shorten that time frame and prepare companies for ordering as soon as the final release was available, Microsoft ran a campaign to get end user customers to use the beta version for testing and evaluation purposes. In this way, Microsoft Canada would be able to process orders and generate sales of Windows 2000 immediately — as soon as the final release was ready to ship.

Challenge
Microsoft decided to run a major lead generation campaign with a select group of fifty reseller partners. The campaign consisted of two parts: lead collection via the web and telemarketing. The challenge was finding a tool that would efficiently distribute more than 1000 leads to these partners and also provide the tools needed for effective lead tracking.
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Host.Net a BroadbandONE Company is headquartered in Boca Raton, FL, and serves the southeastern United States and beyond in the highly competitive world of Internet and network services providers.

In this market most vendors provide very similar products and services such as web hosting and IP phone service, to name two. Surviving and succeeding in this market requires vendors to focus on operational excellence to ensure that they deliver the best possible offers to prospective customers. Very often operational excellence relies on communication and the timely flow of information.

Host.Net recognized that front-end sales initiatives must be carefully coordinated with back-end operations to ensure the relationship is effectively managed throughout the lifecycle. And when customer incidents are reported sales people, for example, must be made fully aware of these issues.

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A Small Business Faces Big Business Challenges

After nearly 30 years in business, Glass Dimensions was a textbook example of how operating as a small, family-owned enterprise had its pros and cons. On one hand, the attention to detail and quality – each product Glass Dimensions makes, from its glass oil candles and lamps to its glass ornaments and vases, is handcrafted – helped build strong relationships with the New England gift shops that sold its products. On the other hand, a changing retail environment meant that a small business like Glass Dimensions needed the resources of a big business if it was to operate efficiently and exploit new sales channels like the Internet.

By 2003, it was painfully clear to Dave Perkins – who with his brother Darrell helps to run the business their father, also named Dave, founded in the family basement in 1975 – that those big business resources were not in place. “We needed better reporting, better integration, and CRM and ERP features that could be tied into Web commerce,” says Perkins. “In fact, we needed better everything if we were to continue operating with any hope of growing our business.”

Searching for Web Commerce Software, and More

The system Glass Dimensions had installed back in 1994, Great Plains, was showing its age. “We basically stretched it as far as we could take it,” says Perkins. An upgrade to Great Plains was considered, but Perkins says the software would have cost $34,000 and “still lacked a lot of functionality.” Glass Dimensions wanted to use the Web to start its own direct sales channel, and for this, Perkins says, integration was key. “It wasn’t an option. It was something that we really needed.”

The search for an integrated solution – a package that could tie Web commerce with marketing and back-end accounting – led Perkins to NetSuite. “What NetSuite offered us was something that has been in the hands of big businesses for some time, the ability to tie together systems and boost efficiency.”

NetSuite Enables Personalized Service and Increased Automation

By powering the Glass Dimensions Web site – launched in the spring of 2003 – and integrating order processing with fulfillment and marketing, NetSuite enabled the Perkins family to grow their business through new, personalized services that previously had not been possible to provide.
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“ACT! and Goldmine weren’t really upgrades from Excel, and Salesforce.com made us pay for a great deal of functionality we didn’t really need. Entellium eSalesForce offered multiple sales processes, whereby each sales rep could use the ideal process for their role. We were up and running within a week.”

– Mitzi Graham, executive director, ScreenPlay

The Challenge

In May of 2005, ScreenPlay reached a critical juncture. With six product groups and eight sales territories, as well as rapidly growing sales and service teams (40 and counting), ScreenPlay had maxed out Microsoft Excel’s limited ability to track customers.

“Excel isn’t really meant to be a CRM tool, and we were experiencing the pain of trying to make it do too much,” said Mitzi Graham, executive director at ScreenPlay. “The inefficiencies were crippling and the lack of data visibility across the company hamstrung our ability to make good decisions.”

As a result of using an inadequate CRM system, ScreenPlay faced the following issues:

• Non-centralized data. Customer information was typically stored in Microsoft Outlook on each salesperson’s computer, putting the data at risk should something happen to the individual’s computer.

• Manual reporting inefficiencies. Graham spent an average of eight hours a week compiling status reports, pipeline forecasts and revenue projections from each sales rep into a single spreadsheet. The complexity of each report reduced the amount of actionable insight available to management.

• “Double calls.” Occasionally two sales people would call the same prospect or company offering complementary products and services. As a result, sales “synergy” was lost.

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Fusion Advisor, Inc. is a Carson City, Nevada-based provider of next-generation technology solutions for the wealth management industry.

Founded in 2005, Fusion Advisor’s core mission is to design and develop cutting-edge software tools that empower independent financial advisors to provide unparalleled service to clients, make smarter and more informed investment decisions, and offer guidance that will maximize the value of each client’s portfolio – all while expanding their business and building a stronger, more recognizable brand.

As the company prepares to introduce it’s very first product to the market – the Wealth Portal™ account aggregation platform – it is relying on powerful customer relationship management from GoldMine to manage all the activities surrounding this exciting launch. GoldMine is helping Fusion Advisor to:

* Build a large base of qualified contacts to market to
* Create and deploy campaigns that will generate awareness and pre-launch “buzz” among key prospects
* Identify opportunities for strategic partnerships
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What does a leading provider of Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions do when faced with rapid growth, a rising demand for its solutions, and an increasing volume of leads? It turns to on-demand Sales Force Automation (SFA) from SalesJunction.com.

The Company

AccuDraft, Inc. provides robust software and comprehensive services for CLM. The company’s innovative, fully-hosted solutions enable organizations to dramatically improve the efficiency and accuracy of their contracts and other vital business documents by simplifying and automating the way they are created and maintained. Over 400 leading companies such as Charles Schwab and Shell Oil rely on AccuDraft to enhance their most vital contract processes and ensure contract compliance.

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