“I knew I would need salespeople and sales processes,” said Yackel, vice president and managing director. “And I felt strongly that we needed a CRM solution that was quickly deployable and would support a highly complex sales process — something flexible out of the gate.”
Flexibility and Usability Required
After examining several solutions, from contact managers to enterprise-size packages, Yackel decided Sage CRM SalesLogix from Sage Software was the right solution.
“We typically offer multiple products and services to an organization,” he said. “Sage CRM SalesLogix has a design and workflow that more intuitively handles the complexities of that kind of sales process while being highly user-friendly."
“The question I asked myself was, ‘What will my people use?’ Sage CRM SalesLogix was the answer.”
Another consideration was ease of customization and implementation. To implement their Sage CRM SalesLogix solution, Yackel chose Cotelligent, a Sage CRM SalesLogix Business Partner. He believed Cotelligent could tailor the system to meet his group’s needs and have it up and running quickly.
The timeline was tight, but Cotelligent and Sage CRM SalesLogix had SEI’s system ready for use in just 45 days. The system was operational with external data imported, with both LAN and remote users online and synchronized. Salespeople using handheld devices were also able to access and synchronize to their Sage CRM SalesLogix data right away.
"The implementation came in on-budget and on-time. The most important thing to me, though, is that everyone on my team utilizes and relies on Sage CRM SalesLogix. It’s an essential element of our sales process."
- John Yackel, Vice President and Managing Director
SEI Investments
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Cotelligent provided two days of training, but a recent addition to Yackel’s team needed only two hours. Yackel said, “Sage CRM SalesLogix is so intuitive that new users don’t require extensive training.”
An Irreplaceable Tool
“The implementation came in on-budget and on-time,” commented Yackel. “The most important thing to me, though, is that everyone on my team utilizes and relies on Sage CRM SalesLogix. It’s an essential element of our sales process.”
Created by Cotelligent, the Opportunity Wizard helps SEI's sales team gather and organize information about prospective clients, which is then used to feed management reports. “Our salespeople like it because they don’t have to take any ‘extra’ actions to supply me with reports,” said Yackel. "I get the data from Sage CRM SalesLogix and export it into SEI's corporate reporting system, sharing vital information between front-office and back-office systems."
Cotelligent also developed a process to integrate data from several outside vendors into SEI’s Sage CRM SalesLogix database. “The process updates existing account records and creates new ones, then assigns them to the appropriate account manager,” said Keith Toland, manager of CRM implementations, Cotelligent. When finished, SEI’s salespeople have fresh data about their customers and prospects available for immediate use.
Since implementing Sage CRM SalesLogix, the number of opportunities Yackel’s team is handling has risen significantly. Even taking into account that the team doubled in size, each salesperson is managing almost three times as many opportunities as before.
“Sage CRM SalesLogix is helping us manage those opportunities so we’re more effective in closing deals,” Yackel says. “Without Sage CRM SalesLogix, we still might have a lot of opportunities in the pipeline, we'd just have more difficulty managing them."
“From evaluation to implementation and utilization, Sage CRM SalesLogix has exceeded all our expectations,” concluded Yackel.
