A Challenging Investment: Signature Worldwide Case Study
August 06, 2008
Signature Worldwide improves team selling and increases revenue with Cloud9 Analytics
(Edited by Stacy Straczynski)
Company Profile: Signature Worldwide
Since 1986, Signature Worldwide has helped more than 5,000 companies develop employee training programs proven to enhance customer service. The company offers customized instructional design services, a wide range of training delivery methods, and continuous reinforcement programs that include ongoing training, employee coaching and performance measurement through mystery shopping services and web-based management tools.
Challenge: Ray Taylor, senior vice president of sales at Signature, needed an efficient system for organizing information about his sales team's activities and improving the usability of Salesforce.com, as well as a means to create real visibility into sales operations, forecasts and pipelines for himself, his reps and his manager, Signature's CEO.
After implementing Salesforce.com, Signature felt that the value they had expected was locked just beyond reach. To obtain critical sales data, Ray was forced to pull metrics every week, merge multiple spreadsheets and rely on his sales reps to update those spreadsheets manually.
"We were using Salesforce.com, but our investment was challenged by the fact that we weren’t getting accurate information out of it that we could act upon," explains Ray. "We needed to a way to become more efficient and effective."
Ray also wanted to increase the value of his individual meetings with Signature's sales reps by offering more focused coaching to help them improve performance. With 60% of his sales force working from remote locations, Ray faced the challenge of ensuring that his team stayed connected with the company as a whole. "From our internal employee survey, I could see that my department was not in alignment with the company," said Ray, "We were a group of individual contributors."
The Solution: Signature considered hiring consultants to create custom changes in Salesforce.com, but realized that such a solution would not change organically as Signature's business and sales needs changed. Instead, Signature turned to Cloud9 Analytics' Pipeline Accelerator with its unique ability to provide:
• A customizable, maintenance-free application that would grow with Signature and the company’s needs
• A dynamic dashboard view into "what's changed" in the pipeline
• Instant custom reports for historical pipeline visibility and trending
• Fast and easy implementation without requiring IT
"It gives me just the right information in just the right format," Ray explains. "We didn't need to have a lot of meetings to discuss the information I wanted to get out of Salesforce, because Cloud9 Analytics had already thought it all through. They know what people like me want to look at."
The Results: After an implementation that required no IT support, Cloud9 Pipeline Accelerator began delivering measurable results in a matter of days. Signature saw its revenue double in the five months between November 2007 and March 2008, with month-to-month increases of 13%, 28% and 34% in the first three months of 2008.
Cloud9 Analytics delivers easy-to-use business intelligence applications directly to sales, marketing, and support organizations as a service over the Internet. The company’s first offering, the Cloud9 Pipeline Management Suite, reduces revenue risk, increases team productivity and provides shared visibility for collaboration at every level of the sales organization. Powered by the industry's first truly on-demand analytics platform, Cloud9's applications deliver value in just 24 hours and require zero installation, zero maintenance and zero IT support. Cloud9 Analytics' customers include market leaders such as Ryder, Data Domain, Coremetrics and GENBAND. For more information, please visit www.cloud9analytics.com.
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