Sage CRM success story - IONA

Sage CRM Customer Success

International IT Company IONA deploys Sage CRM MME and becomes more efficient Customer IONA Industry IT Location Ireland Solution Sage CRM

IONA is an international company, headquartered in Dublin that provides IT integration products and services to a number of Global 2000 clients. The company was formed in 1994 and now boasts 4,500 clients worldwide, including airline maker Boeing and mobile phone giant Nokia.

The challenge Given IONA’s high-profile customer base, it could not afford to have an ineffectual customer relationship management (CRM) system.

However IONA found that its employees were working on internal sales systems that they found slow and difficult to use, and a lack of integration between systems meant that data was often inaccurate and out of date.

The CRM system that IONA was using until March 2002 had a number of limitations, the main problem being its lack of automation capabilities. Another

Challenge Internal sales systems were slow and difficult to use, and a lack of integration between systems at IONA meant that data was often inaccurate and out of date. A lack of automation capabilities and integration was found between the CRM systems used in the US, Asia and Europe and its SAP system. As a result, there were data entry problems and errors.

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was the lack of integration between the CRM systems IONA used in the US, Asia and Europe and its SAP system. As a result, there were data entry problems and errors.

To complicate matters further, IONA’s sales staff used the Miller Heiman Strategic Selling process – a specific type of sales training that requires part of the sales reporting to be completed on spreadsheets. Because of this approach, any reporting that was carried out in accordance with the process was generated outside the company’s existing CRM system.

The solution IONA considered CRM applications from Siebel, Salesforce.com and Pivotal before deciding on Sage CRM. “Sage CRM was deemed to be the product of choice by the sales user community,” says Ó Foghlú. “But there were also a number of other reasons for selecting this product.”

Solution Sage CRM was implemented to provide IONA with visibility on its customers activities and helped strengthen relations with their customers.

Results Sage CRM provides IONA an enhanced view of its business and enables it to track the response rates of sales and marketing campaigns.

Sage CRM Customer Success

‘We wanted to improve our view of the customer at any given time throughout the sales cycle. We also needed a more automated way to track and assign customer leads, a better way of capturing all our customer contacts, and a way of delivering more timely and accurate reports.’

Cormac Ó Foghlú, Worldwide Infrastructure Manager, IONA

It was a fully web-based solution, which was critical for a global implementation, and it could support the forecasting functionality that our business model required. Sage CRM was also compatible with web services, thereby ensuring successful integration with our financial system, any of our existing databases and any other potential systems.”

Following successful completion of a pilot phase, the system was implemented across all IONA sites – Europe, four in the US and three across Asia. The global implementation was complete by January 2003. The project took just six months from the initial planning stages through to implementation and was delivered on time and to schedule. Ó Foghlú believes that user acceptance is a key factor for any implementation to be a success. “During the implementation across Europe, user testing proved to be very encouraging,” he says. “We had a lot of positive feedback from our CRM staff, who had been deeply suspicious of any automation tools introduced to them in the past.”

Meanwhile, as part of a larger project, a global systems integration plan was running parallel to the Sage CRM implementation. “Integration took place between our existing database and our financial system,” says Ó Foghlú.

“IONA’s own integration product was used, which provided a specific plug-in that would translate the information coming from the SAP system to Sage CRM and vice versa.”

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The benefits Ó Foghlú says that the most significant advantage of Sage CRM is that it enables IONA to have an enhanced forward-looking view of its business.

IONA’s employees across the world now use Sage CRM on a daily basis. “Our marketing team carries out customerspecific direct marketing and opt-in email campaigns,” says Ó Foghlú. All marketing activities are monitored within the system and all communications are stored. This ensures that employees can easily look up specific messages when clients call or write in about a particular campaign.”

The Sage CRM system also enables IONA to track the response rates of each sales and marketing campaign.

“We can now view the status and success rate of each campaign at any given time. We can even analyze campaigns by lead source. Not only can we track response rates, but we can match sales revenue to specific campaigns and track the return-oninvestment of each marketing campaign,” says Ó Foghlú.

Another benefit of the Sage CRM implementation is IONA’s unified customer view. Each employee at the company can now view every detail of the sales cycle from first contact to final sale, extending across all the offices in each of their specific regions.

About Sage CRM Over 15,000 small and medium sized companies across the globe use Sage CRM every day to accelerate sales, drive business productivity and make every customer interaction count. It is used by enterprising, growing companies seeking new ways to interact with customers, leverage the power of social media and take advantage of the latest mobile developments to further grow their business. When combined with Sage ERP, our customers enjoy better business insight, increased efficiencies and productivity, and gain a single, customer-centric view across their entire business. So whether you’re just starting out or have already grown to several hundred employees, Sage CRM can help accelerate your business success.

Accelerate your business success with a free 30-day trial at www.sagecrm.com

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Š 2014 Sage Group Plc.

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