At Harris Interactive, Salesforce Delivers ROI and Boosts Forecast Accuracy

“Salesforce has allowed us to reinvent the way we think about our business. Our challenges are unique to our industry and we have customized Salesforce to make it one of the most important applications in the company today.”


Challenge
  • Harris Interactive, a worldwide market research and consulting firm, needed to improve global communication and sales efficiency by enabling greater cross-functional support among sales, marketing, finance, and research
  • Executives wanted a “sales culture” in which the sales organization and company overall adopted a cohesive approach to selling
  • The company needed one common system globally that its new sales organization and other business units could access anywhere, anytime
  • Harris Interactive wanted to overcome the challenges from its previous Siebel investment, such as user complexity, lack of customization capabilities, low user adoption, and poor ROI

Solution
  • After discarding Siebel and considering Salesforce and Saleslogix, Harris Interactive deployed Salesforce because of its cost-effective on-demand platform, flexible integration options, and customization capabilities
  • Harris Interactive implemented Salesforce in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia, tailoring more than 250 fields to manage contacts, opportunities, leads, marketing campaigns, accounting, legal trademarks & agreements, and reporting
  • With Salesforce’s intelligent workflow capabilities, Harris incorporated formulas into approval processes to streamline its complex commissions management process
  • With Salesforce, the company has one common platform tying operations to sales, resulting in greater communication, operational efficiency, and customer intelligence
  • Apps such a CRM Fusion’s DemandTools, ExactTarget’s ExactTarget for AppExchange, and Centive’s Centive Compel extend Salesforce’s functionality; Harris Interactive also wrote its own “Competitive Profiles” app using Force.com Builder

Results
  • Salesforce’s software-as-a-service model enables Harris Interactive to avoid $250,000 per year in administrative management costs typically associated with traditional CRM offerings
  • Accurate sales forecasting, which was hit-or-miss before Salesforce was deployed, has improved significantly and is as high as 90 percent in some divisions
  • Forecast creation time has decreased by an estimated 50 percent
  • In the U.S. and U.K., ROI was achieved within the first month; in France, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong and Singapore, ROI was achieved immediately
  • Supply-chain efficiency has doubled
  • With Salesforce, the company has over 90 percent user adoption globally
 
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