The 2013 CRM Elite [Customer Relationship Management]

EVERY YEAR, companies figure out new and innovative ways to cut costs, bolster revenue, become more efficient, and increase productivity. This year is no different, and we've highlighted some of the most impressive examples of businesses that have done so in this year's CRM Elite awards. Congratulations to Angie's List, Rosetta Stone, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and Yapi Kredi Bank for raising the bar in their customer engagement efforts.

By the editors of CRM magazine

Angie's List

Unifying Member Promotions

Using TinderBox, the Internet rating site streamlines contract agreements

THE CHALLENGE

Angie's List is a member-based Web site that seeks to connect quality local service providers and contractors with more than 2 million households across the United States and Canada. The company, which began in 1996 as a door-to-door enterprise created by Columbus, Ohio-based Angie Hicks, went live online in 1999, expanded into Canada in 2010, and became a publicly traded company just a year later.

Because Angie's List is a paid service, reviews and recommendations for everything from home repair to healthcare are carefully vetted for quality assurance.

In addition to being able to have confidence in the service providers they are referred to through the company, Angie's List members can sign up to receive exclusive email offers and discounts from highly rated service providers through Angie's List's The Big Deal program, which is similar to a Groupon or LivingSocial deal. On the flip side, sales representatives are continuously seeking out service providers who are willing to go in on a deal to increase their own business.

"What we'll do is negotiate on behalf of the buying power of our members and say, 'What if we could source forty to fifty jobs in a matter of days via an email campaign? Would you be willing to give us a discount for those jobs?"' explains Ben Ledo, director of The Big Deal at Angie's List. The next, and most important, step in the process of running a promotion or discount is structuring a deal through a contract, building out content, and emailing the deal to site members.

Finalizing and accepting the contract has also been a source of friction for the company, according to Ledo. "We kept running into the issue where we had service providers agree to the concept, agree to participate, and then we would lose them in the process of their application or contract," he explains. To put it simply, Angie's List needed a way to see where service providers would get stuck where they would drop off, and how sales representatives could improve the flow of communication to increase proposal acceptance.

THE SOLUTION

Angie's List, which had until this point relied on a homegrown, "proprietary toolset" to generate contract proposals, in early 2012 turned to TinderBox, a provider of enterprise sales proposal, presentation, and contract management solutions, to see how it could tie its internal systems to TinderBox's flexible application programming interface.

Through customization, TinderBox was able to facilitate a proposal creation path to make it easy to create, send, and track proposals throughout various stages of the contract process. One of the immediate benefits was the visibility it afforded Angie's List.

"We can go back and look and understand and see where [the service providers] focused, where they spent their time, and start addressing their concerns," Ledo says. "Those conversations help our salespeople [target] true concerns and objections those service companies have. Also, it's measuring [activity]. You can't really improve something if you don't have that baseline to measure it."

TinderBox came to the aid of Angie's List from an organizational sense, as well. In the past, 45 sales reps would send individual emails with contracts based on past proposals. What resulted was a lack of uniformity and consistency. Using TinderBox's prebuilt templates to streamline the process, "reps would get off the phone with someone and feel like they had really closed a sale."

By using TinderBox, the company has been able to achieve an average close rate of 85 percent of its published proposals. Since it implemented TinderBox, the company has created more than 13,500 contracts using the software and has found that 48 percent of all proposals sent using the service were accepted by prospects last year. In addition, each Angie's List representative currently produces an average of 20 contracts per month, representing one deal per sales rep per business day.

Although TinderBox has been especially useful to Angie's List in its traditional sales stages and contract process, Ledo says the company is not opposed to deploying the software for post-sale processes. Once a service provider signs a contract, TinderBox has "a fantastic presentation [tool] where you can embed videos" and provide access to how-tos and further information. -Kelly Liyakasa

real results

* Achieved an average close rate of 85 percent of published proposals.

* Nearly half (48 percent) of all proposals were accepted within the past year.

* Each rep produced an average of 20 new contracts per month.

* Published 13,500-plus contracts to date using "TinderBox.

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The Language of Smarter Selling

Since deploying InsideView, Rosetta Stone has increased its conversion rates

THE CHALLENGE

Rosetta Stone, the global language-learning technology company, might be best known for selling CD-ROMs at shopping mall kiosks across the country. However, the company set its sights on business language learning when, in 2009, it released a front-end management administrative application and business-specific product, according to Charles Frydenborg, senior director of corporate sales in North America for Rosetta Stone.

Although Rosetta Stone's consumer division constitutes about 75 percent of its revenue, the burgeoning institutional business, which consists of education, corporate, and government groups, is rapidly heating up. Because consumer and institutional markets are markedly different in regard to product usage, this trickles into the marketing and sales of the product itself.

In consumer sales, it's about perpetual new client acquisition. Every time a customer purchases a Rosetta Stone product, he or she purchases one unit. When companies buy language-learning technology, they tend to buy at scale, which opens up more opportunity for Rosetta Stone to expand its footprint at-large, Frydenborg notes.

One of the top challenges for Rosetta Stone's sales reps was seeking out the proper point person in a prospective client organization. Language learning has traditionally spanned human resources to corporate training, but it's no longer unusual for business unit leaders or corporate heads of operations to make a technology-purchasing decision. As a result, Rosetta Stone needed to get more strategic with its selling efforts.

THE SOLUTION

Historically, Rosetta Stone sales reps relied on public database information from platforms such as Hoovers and Jigsaw to seek out contacts at companies. While these information sources were useful for gleaning high-level information and statistics about companies, sales reps found they weren't as targeted "when it came to understanding the individual or individuals we should be contacting in an effort to pitch our product," Frydenborg remarks.

As a result, Rosetta Stone rolled out paid premium professional social networking accounts on Linkedln to sales reps, which "were great for identifying people, but still [left a] gap [when we tried to] marry that access to individuals with granular, detailed, prescriptive information about organizations," he says. So, in the fall of 2011, the company's sales team embarked on a pilot using sales and marketing solution provider InsideView's Sales Intelligence solution to not only identify the companies it should be targeting, but also whom within an organization was the most relevant contact. The team experienced a full rollout of the tool and expanded access for field sales reps in late 2012.

Using Sales Intelligence in conjunction with the company's Salesforce.com CRM system, reps are able to cull dynamic alerts and information about key accounts or companies from data sources that cross the spectrum of social media to legal or financial filings.

"It has made us a much more effective and efficient organization. We spend less time targeting companies that can't and won't buy," Frydenborg explains. "Then when we identify the right companies, we are much more effective at getting to our potential buyers quickly. It has been an outstanding tool for prospecting, account management, and for opportunity qualification and generation."

Using InsideView Sales Intelligence, sales teams have been able to find and convert new leads more effectively. The company discovered that sales reps using InsideView achieved 22 percent greater lead-to-opportunity conversions by improving response rates on emails and phone calls.

The average win rate went up by 12 percent as a result of reps having more ammunition in selling conversations. And because Rosetta Stones sales reps were now reaching more prospective buyers in organizations, they were able to increase the average deal size by 33 percent by expanding the number of licenses sold to organizations during each transaction.

Rosetta Stone sales reps were able to improve the selling conversation as well, by adding a personal touch. One sales rep, for instance, tapped into InsideView's Connections feature and was able to determine that a member of the executive management team at a retail company and prospective client company was a former colleague of Rosetta Stone's executive counsel.

"The salesperson [now] has to be consultative, and you can only be in a consultative role if you are fully informed about your client, their business, where they're investing their dollars, and where they are in terms of their strategy," Frydenborg concludes. -Kelly Liyakasa

real results

* Grew its average deal size by 33 percent.

* Bolstered its lead-to-opportunity conversion rate by 22 percent.

* Increased its average win rate by 12 percent.

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Getting Government Organized

Microsoft Dynamics automates business processes and improves productivity across state government

THE CHALLENGE

More than 8 million people live in Virginia-which means there are a lot of government records to maintain. With a growing population, many agencies throughout the commonwealth were struggling with outdated, costly CRM models that hindered citizen service. "Each agency was operating its technology through separate parts. What we sought to do was bring a more businesslike and more disciplined approach to managing technology across the enterprise of state government," says Sam Nixon Jr., chief information officer for the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The economic crisis that left many states facing financial challenges while struggling to meet citizens' needs was an additional burden. "[We] had to balance our budget, and we wanted to turn to better technology to help us do that," Governor Bob McDonnell says.

With obsolete CRM solutions and an unpredictable economic environment, the Commonwealth of Virginia was ready to take the plunge and implement uniform solutions across agencies, improve accountability, and ultimately fix the way its citizens interact with state agencies.

THE SOLUTION

Working closely with government officials, Virginia's Microsoft Dynamics CRM team quickly identified the key issue and determined how to solve it. "They had multiple agencies using various tools with no consistency, and we were able to meet this challenge by standardizing their approach on our platform," Leo Manson, senior marketing manager at Microsoft, explains.

The solutions deployed were individualized to meet the needs of each agency, including the Department of Historic Resources, die Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services, the Secretary of the Commonwealth, the Virginia Information Technology Agency, and the Governor's Office.

The State Board of Elections worked with Microsoft Dynamics to cut costs and increase efficiency. The Board of Elections, responsible for conducting and monitoring all elections in the state, didn't have enough HR, procurement, or inventory resources and turned to CRM for those solutions, says Matthew Davis, information resources manager at the Board of Elections. In the first election following the December 2011 solution deployment, more than 1,400 campaigns and political committees filed applications electronically through the implementation. "Prior to our locality management system, we had multiple Excel spreadsheets and access databases that were outside of the control of the IT department within our agency. Through the new system, all our staff is now able to easily access all 134 localities' information," Davis says. The Board of Elections has reduced staffing requirements by two full-time employees and eliminated the need for an outside agency to provide additional support services.

The modernized business functions have enabled faster processing of inquiries and concerns, helped expedite the retirement of outdated, often unsupported software and hardware systems, and allowed for the reassignment of staff to other tasks. Results from multiple agencies show upward of a 45 percent reduction in request processing time and a 50 percent staff reduction.

"Our solution has allowed IT teams to hire less staff, since many of the agencies can do some of the work themselves now," Manson says. "For example, notary public applications, which took between thirty and sixty days to process, now take less than a week, despite less.. .people working on them," he adds.

With the solution, most agencies were able to almost immediately clear a four-week backlog, and, over three years, the deployment is projected to save Virginia more than $340,000.

The commonwealth plans to expand the use of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to other agencies and departments, particularly the Authentications department in the Secretary's Office. The goal is to implement a single sign-on system that citizens can use when interacting with the government online. "That way, if you need to renew your driver's permit or get a new license for your boat, you would only need one set of sign-on credentials per citizen, versus requiring new credentials for each interaction with a different area of government," Manson says. The department plans to replace its financial management systems and improve its human resources department as well. "All the things in the future," Manson says, "are aimed to make citizen interaction with the government more efficient." -Maria Minsker

real results

* Three-year savings are projected to be around $340,000.

* A four-week backlog was cleared in most agencies.

* Customer request turnaround time was reduced from 25 days to 7 days.

* Staff was reduced by 50 percent.

* Processing time was reduced by 45 percent.

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Banking on SAS

Yapi Kredi Bank uses a marketing optimization application to reach customers with the right pitch at the right time

THE CHALLENGE

Like many financial institutions, Yapi Kredi Bank has historically had a product-centric mentality. The bank, which has more than 6.5 million business and personal banking customers in its native Turkey and other operations in the Netherlands, Russia, and Azerbaijan, put all its focus on selling its retail and corporate banking, credit card, leasing, asset and wealth management, securities brokerage, insurance, payroll, and pension products and services to as many customers as possible.

Naturally, a few heads turned when executives at the 70year-old banking firm initiated a shift to a more customer-oriented focus that puts the emphasis on what customers really need and want from a bank rather than on what the bank wants to sell them.

THE SOLUTION

The change has resulted in Yapi Kredi doubling its customer base, increasing the number of products sold to retail customers as well as its cross-sell successes, and growing its revenue in the process.

Key to all this has been the company's use of SAS Customer Intelligence Solutions, particularly the SAS Marketing Optimization product that Yapi Kredi rolled out in August 2012. The solution is helping Yapi Kredi predict how business constraints will affect marketing programs and create whatif scenarios to see how the changes will affect overall business outcomes. The solution also helps the bank determine the right channel to use to reach particular customers, in which campaigns to include them, and the right time to reach them.

Arzu Umur, director of CRM and campaign management at Yapi Kredi, says the bank implemented SAS Marketing Optimization "with the aim to analyze results using more effective methods." Now, she calls it "essential" to helping Yapi Kredi reach the right customers with the right product at the right time.

That's important, given that the bank has many touch points to reach its customers, including 929 branch offices in 75 cities, nearly 2,900 ATMs, two call centers, email, text messaging, and Internet and mobile banking. "Analysis shows that some customers tend to respond more positively to [automated] campaigns, but the sales process for some critical processes, like loans and complex investments, can only be completed on live channels," Umur points out.

All of the touch points across the sales cycle are integrated together, Umur says, "to present a seamless experience to the customer."

Another goal of the project was to minimize customer effort in the sales cycle. Now, customer product needs are tracked online and passed on to the sales teams for action.

"Customers are more likely to buy products if reached proactively at the time of demand," Umur observes.

"Offers presented to customers from any channel and responded to positively are led to live channels," she adds.

The latest SAS deployment complemented the other SAS solutions that Yapi Kredi had already been using for data mining. It has been an SAS Enterprise Miner user since 2001, relying on the insight provided to assess its customers' likelihood to buy any product or service.

Additional CRM solutions in place at the bank include SAP BusinessObjects for reporting, Chordiant Marketing Director for online and offline campaign management (Chordiant was acquired by Pegasystems in 2010), and a contact management solution developed in-house.

"The most significant benefit of lead generation is giving immediate response to customers' demands," Umur says. "Their product needs are tracked online by the bank, resulting in customers feeling important and cared for, which ensures increased satisfaction and loyalty."

According to Umur, Yapi Kredi has more than tripled sales to contacted customers and tripled its revenue per call. Its cross-sell index scores-used to measure the number of products a customer has with the bank-increased from 3.6 to 6. Its customer loyalty index scores-based on the depth of the customers' relationship with the bank-increased from 4.2 to 7.1.

Yapi Kredi, a 2012 Gartner CRM Excellence Award winner in customer analytics, also credits the SAS Marketing Optimization solution with "increasing sales rates and the efficiency of campaign offers, decreasing channel costs, and deepening customer relations by means of increasing cross-sell and profitability," Umur concludes. -Leonard Klie

real results

* More than tripled sales to contacted customers.

* Tripled revenue per call.

* Increased cross-sell index scores from 3.6 to 6.

* Improved customer loyalty index scores from 4.2 to 7.1.