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StemCell Technologies, Inc, didn't waste any time figuring out that a 500 per cent return on a $20,000 customer relationship management investment made a lot of sense. The Vancouver-based biotechnology company develops and sells specialized cell culture media to a global customer base that includes professors and researchers at universities, hospitals and biotech companies. It is in the process of deploying Maximizer Enterprise 8, which will be used by StemCell's sales, marketing and technical support teams in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and France to track customers, prospects and leads, synchronize contacts and calendars, access pertinent information about accounts, and much more.
The Challenge
StemCell's foray into CRM began around five years ago, and coincided with major changes in its organizational structure, including the launch of satellite offices and remote sales teams. Until then, field staff used applications such as Outlook to store and communicate customer data. "The challenge," says Cam Buschel, sales and marketing analyst at StemCell, "was to synchronize all of that information and make it available in a meaningful format to the technical support and research departments at our head office."
As the Company's client base grew and its sales team expanded globally, StemCell's sales force often worked independently of one another. This created challenges for office managers who didn't have visibility into what was going on with customers and prospects in the remote sales regions. What StemCell needed was a way of centralizing all of the information its sales teams were collecting, and the ability to share it with its growing sales force of remote field representatives. Buschel says it was around that time they started using Maximizer Enterprise 6 for its synchronization capabilities.
Two years ago StemCell upgraded to Maximizer Enterprise 7, taking advantage of that version's more extensive capabilities to set up global marketing campaigns and track responses.
Since then, explosive business growth - StemCell's sales revenues rose 15 to 25 per cent a year - triggered the need for an even more robust CRM solution.
The Maximizer Enterprise Solution
Before purchasing a complete CRM solution, StemCell's, sales and marketing managers met with the sales team and support staff to discuss their requirements and to gain insight into what information each department needed, how they wanted to work, and how their working styles impacted each others departments. "We wanted to get as much user buy-in as possible," says Andrew Knowles, assistant sales manager at StemCell, and a key advocate for the company's CRM program. "We knew our CRM investment would only provide value if those it was meant for actually used it."
Through these meetings the management team determined their CRM system would need the following capabilities: out-of-the-box integration, an easy way to enter contacts and organize sales leads; tools for remote synchronizing of contacts and calendars; reporting tools and integration with accounting; and since StemCell's remote sales force was growing so quickly, they preferred per-user pricing, which would reduce their up-front costs.
After evaluating various CRM products, StemCell selected Maximizer Enterprise 8 and is now deploying it to sales representatives in North America, the UK and France, and to technical support staff in the corporate head office. Users now keep copies of the Maximizer Enterprise database on their computers, which can be utilized, both on-line and off-line, and they can log into the corporate database whenever it's convenient.
"We wouldn't have been able to develop our field force without Maximizer Enterprise," said Knowles. "In order to have functional field reps, we needed a way for them to report in, provide updates and get information from us. Maximizer Enterprise gave us a way to work live remotely."
Installing Maximizer Enterprise
StemCell teamed with two Certified Maximizer Business Partners, CRM Consulting and Alpha Pacific Technologies to implement Maximizer Enterprise. StemCell has already completed a test installation of thirty seats and has updated its database, which currently includes some 60,000 contacts. "We accomplished that in a few hours," says Buschel. "Staff training and updating remote sites will take a month at the most."
CRM Consulting and Alpha Pacific Technologies also helped StemCell create and customize dozens of user-defined fields (UDF's). The sales team requested these as a way of profiling prospect and customer records in a single snapshot. The Business Partners were also able to integrate Maximizer Enterprise into StemCell's accounting, ordering, and inventory management systems. Now, StemCell's sales reps have access to all of the pertinent information for each account - part and order numbers, purchase dates, shipment notes and more.
The Price is Right
For a project of this magnitude, the price tag is relatively modest. Buschel estimates a total project investment - software, consulting and maintenance - in the neighborhood of $20,000. While a formal cost-benefit analysis has not been done, StellCell is predicting a five-fold ROI, at the very least. "That's not unreasonable when you factor in the price discount we got as an existing Maximizer customer, and the new version's powerful features," says Buschel.
One of these features is Crystal Reports, a business-reporting tool that offers users pre-formatted reports on the effectiveness of sales, marketing and customer service staff and programs. In the past these reports were run off StemCell's centralized database. With Crystal Reports bundled into version 8, field reps can generate them on their own, without relying on central office.
"Our sales team can use this information to generate detailed customer profiles, interact with their contacts more quickly, and create stronger client relationships," says Buschel, "Maximizer Enterprise 8 will allow managers to leverage the business intelligence capabilities to precisely calculate metrics on sales, marketing and technical support activities and promptly seize opportunities before the competition does."
Maximizer Enterprise is A Sound Investment
Since installing their CRM system, StemCell has been able to grow its customer base and generate more revenue. In addition, Maximizer Enterprise has saved StemCell hundreds of hours of data entry time by allowing new research to be imported into Maximizer Enterprise, analyzed, and summarized so sales quotas can be set for each region. The marketing components of Maximizer Enterprise have increased the number of sales leads, which are automatically assigned to the appropriate field sales rep, and the records and notes are updated throughout the sales cycle. Maximizer Enterprise has made possible a whole new level of access to intimate knowledge of research projects, status of funding, and nurturing of relationships to help close deals and retain clients for ongoing business.
"Maximizer Enterprise has become a one-stop-shop for our sales reps to see all of the critical information they need to intelligently and successfully service an account," says Knowles. "As we've grown, we discussed moving to a larger enterprise CRM system like Siebel, but after assessing what they offered and what is capable with our current CRM system, we decided to stay with Maximizer Enterprise. It is meeting our needs at a much lower cost than anything else we looked at - we were able to deploy it quickly and we can add functionality as we grow. Ultimately, Maximizer Enterprise gives us the market intelligence we need to respond to customer and market demands before our competition does."
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