ScreenPlay Turns to Entellium for Sales Force Automation
“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.
The Solution
After reviewing a host of contact management systems, including ACT! and Goldmine—as well as reviewing full-featured CRM from Entellium and Salesforce.com—Graham chose Entellium. She cited sales workflow and customer-friendly terms as the key reasons for her decision.
“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,” Graham said. “Entellium eSalesForce offered multiple sales processes, whereby each sales rep could use the ideal process for their role.” She also praised Entellium’s modular pricing and flexible terms. “We were up and running within a week,”she said.
Entellium eSalesForce, the company’s sales force automation solution, is built from the “bottom-up,” with input from scores of sales professionals. The company’s recent PRO-Activity Release was based on more than 50,000 hours of usability research, with the result being the most user-centric CRM solution on the market today. In addition, Entellium’s CRM suite has a lower total cost of ownership than Salesforce.com’s Professional and Enterprise Editions.
What Entellium CRM means for ScreenPlay Employees
After deploying Entellium, ScreenPlay employees were able to turn chaos into order and efficiency. They were able to enter data into the system easily, with minimal clicks, plus offer broad visibility to the whole company on vital account details.
ScreenPlay relies on Entellium for many facets of customer engagement. For example, when a customer calls, ScreenPlay’s office manager quickly types the customer’s name into Entellium eSalesForce. This shows her the most appropriate ScreenPlay representative to contact, as well as alternates if the primary representative is not available. This ensures maximum customer service.
ScreenPlay’s New York sales representative has a short sales cycle—sometimes deals close in an hour. In this environment, Entellium’s application serves as an instant activity tracking and management tool. The user can quickly judge the return on investment of a particular product and promotion.
In contrast, ScreenPlay’s major accounts representative in Los Angeles has a sales cycle of 12 to18 months. This sales professional uses Entellium to manage the entire sales process. Prospects are first identified by a sales assistant through research, news articles or other documents that could produce opportunities. The sales assistant then enters the contact information for the prospect, and the appropriate follow-up activity for the major account representative. A sales rep then opens the Entellium dashboard and is presented with a daily list of to-do’s. The rep can quickly view the pipeline of leads and opportunities. The application keeps the rep on target with a large volume of accounts (all in different stages of the sales cycle), ensuring that he or she doesn’t miss important deadlines or follow-up opportunities.
Want to learn more about Entellium’s sales force automation solution? Request a demo today >>>
[Photo courtesy of kaigi.]
