Case Study: CRM at Threadneedle Investments

Threadneedle selected Salesforce.com ahead of Microsoft Dynamics and CDC Pivotal

A change in distribution leadership at asset management company Threadneedle Investments saw it examine its customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities in a bid to improve the company's operational controls.

The firm was shifting from its on-premise Siebel CRM system and, in November 2010, asked consultancy Alpha FMC to run a request for proposal (RFP) as part of the procurement process.

"[With Siebel] we suffered from poor sponsorship, governance and adoption," Threadneedle's head of distribution and corporate systems, Barry Clarke, told Computing.

Clarke said that Alpha FMC's main task was to engage with the business as, according to him, only 10 per cent of the project is based on the technology, with the other 90 per cent on business management.

The company's three options were Microsoft Dynamics, CDC Pivotal and Salesforce.com.

"The two front runners were Microsoft Dynamics, as we had an enterprise agreement through our parent company that would make it almost free, and Salesforce.com, as through our parent company we could leverage a very good deal on licensing," Clarke explained.

But ease of contractual negotiations and costs were not the only considerations.

"I did not want bunches of technology people running the CRM project. We had that with Siebel. It takes too long to do anything, and you lose the business's faith. With Siebel you had to build it, test it and fix your bugs, which takes too long. I wanted a small nimble team that could react to the business quickly," Clarke said.

He added: "I did not want to have a two-week lead time on standing up virtual servers or the cost associated with that. Nor did I want to depend on niche developers."

Clarke said that Microsoft Dynamics would also have needed niche developers and that Salesforce.com enabled a better speed to market with a dedicated development team. As part of the pilot, Salesforce.com came ahead of Dynamics on the technology side, as well as in terms of other factors such as usability.

"When we did our scoring cards, Salesforce.com also came in front for the way it looked and how intuitive it was. Dynamics at the time was an older version, which did not look as nice, there were multiple screens and it did not work as well. We had just installed Microsoft Outlook as well and Dynamics polluted Outlook - we did not want CRM taking over Outlook, we wanted it left clean," Clarke explained.

In March 2011, therefore, Threadneedle decided to go with Salesforce.com, but because of the economic uncertainty at the time, the project was put on hold.

Case Study: CRM at Threadneedle Investments

Threadneedle selected Salesforce.com ahead of Microsoft Dynamics and CDC Pivotal

In retrospect, though, Clarke said that Threadneedle should have gone ahead and invested in the new CRM system when the market hit rock bottom.

After reconsidering its options the company decided to go ahead with its initial plans from August 2011 and, after implementing the basic CRM system, it also added the "sales pipeline" function in October 2011.

With this module, the company can ring various sales personnel from around the world within the company on a Friday and receive responses on what they think is a business opportunity or not - enabling greater visibility of sales opportunities, said Clarke.

He wanted the company to build email and spreadsheet work into Salesforce to encourage maximum use of the application and, therefore, maximise value for money from the licence fee.

"We need the staff to keep their opportunity pipeline up to date and keep correct information on Salesforce. If we didn't do that it is misinformation and as we need to report back to our board we would look unprofessional," claimed Clarke.

The use of Salesforce.com's social tool Chatter is also important, according to Clarke.

"It gives us that extra one or two per cent polish. So if we were dealing with a financial services client and three of our team were meeting their clients from three different countries, Chatter enables them to collaborate during the deal and let everyone know what is happening.

"If it was email, it may take longer to find the email and with multi-million pound deals you may not have time to file systematically every day," he said.

Measuring success

The company has a traditional dashboard to find out who is logging into the Salesforce.com system and when. It has also integrated Microsoft Outlook's email and calendar to Active DS, which allows the company to find out which staff are actively emailing and booking meetings in order to gauge productivity.

But putting a precise figure on any sales increase as a result of the implementation is harder to do, admitted Clarke. "It is hard to quantify... but by using Salesforce.com we have the capability to release people from doing administrative tasks and this improves efficiency.

"It gives us operational controls that we did not have before, but we can't go hands off. I believe that if we let Salesforce.com stand as it is, that is when we would start to fail, particularly as Salesforce.com are innovating so quickly," he said.