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Case Study – LodgeWorks
Michael L. Miller
Vice President Sales
LodgeWorks
Wichita, KS
LodgeWorks is a privately held developer, owner and operator of extended stay hotels. Their CRM implementation included the conversion of every ACT database used individually by their sales team. Switching from an existing application and taking advantage of the expanded functionality of salesforce.com meant a great deal of change.
When you got involved with salesforce.com and Model Metrics, what was your company's main objective?
Our goal was to customize the features available in salesforce.com to meet the unique qualifying nature and standards of our sales culture. We are a performance driven company, therefore we wanted to make sure we not only improved the contact management piece, we also wanted to increase the performance and accountability of our sales professionals as well. The reporting capability and transparency of the activities and revenue production is like nothing we have ever seen in a CRM.
Management involvement and commitment are always key in a project like this, is there any advice you would like to share with others?
Because we are a direct sales driven company, commitment was the easiest part for us. We began researching sales automation software well over a year ago, and made sure we found the best fit. We wanted the best tools and most up to date technology on the market. I'm responsible for the sales organization and its performance; I had to be involved in every detail in the beginning to make sure our company goals were met. It was easy for our organization to see how committed my management team and I were to this project.
What was the biggest challenge you encountered and how did you overcome it?
Data Migration by far was our biggest challenge. When you use an independent sales software such as ACT, and try to merge it with an enterprise application as sophisticated as this one, unexpected things are going to happen. We communicated regularly on what to expect and prepared our sales professionals for what to do if and when problems would occur. The work of our IT team and the Model Metrics team was outstanding given the very large number of databases, size of data and number of records we were moving. Communication was a key part of our successful transition.
User adoption is a major issue. How did you overcome it?
Our people have been asking for a sophisticated tool like this for a long time. We encouraged early buy-in and provided training on salesforce.com well before our tool was ready to launch. That really got our sales professionals excited about what was coming. We only have 75 users and last week alone we had as many as 70 users at a time logging in during prime selling time. That includes the senior leaders in the organization as well; pretty impressive, I think.
Our direct sales process is called "SalesWorks", which includes a number of unique questions, company terms and three clearly defined phases to the sales call process. The way in which Model Metrics was able to use our process and integrate our terms into salesforce.com made it easy for the sales force to navigate and manage through it. Familiarity was very important early on.
Overall, I'm proud of our end result, and believe it is the differentiator between our competitors and us.
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