Satori Group
Background
The Satori Group is a leading provider of business performance management and planning systems, established in March 2002. The Satori Group has an international presence with offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Johannesburg and Philadelphia.
Satori Australia runs sales teams for five different business units, in three states, across the east coast. Satori Group has over 18 staff members in Australia.
These business units focus on the sale of in-house developed software, software maintenance, support services and consulting services.
Satori’s requirement
Based on a previous implementation of Microsoft CRM v1, Satori was committed to ensuring that their investment in the software licensing and deployment continued to be realised.
However, with sales teams based in NSW and Victoria, both using different sales contact and pipeline tracking systems, Satori was at a size where rationalisation of systems was required.
In addition, Satori was tracking software license sales and maintenance revenue in a completely separate system (ACT). This resulted in additional data transfer work and the potential for errors and inefficiencies.
Satori took the decision early on 2007 to re-implement Microsoft CRM v3.0.
Satori’s CRM objectives were:
- Achieve a single sales and contact management system, including tracking of all aspects of software sales. Remove all data and activity on the old (ACT) system, and import this into the Microsoft CRM system
- Have all members of the sales teams in NSW and Victoria use the system effectively as possible, and to their satisfaction. Sales teams members were encouraged to input as to what information, tasks and activities they used, and the expectation was that the system would be modified to suit
- Provide the sales team members and sales management with the required minimum of sales views and information across their respective business units and products, so as to be able to manage their sales teams effectively (reporting).
Customer Brief
After an initial attempt to install and rollout Microsoft CRM v3.0 internally, Satori turned to RightServe for the following:
- Re-implementation of Microsoft CRM v3.0, including expanding the user base from being solely NSW-based to audiences in Victoria
- Consultation with the NSW and Victorian sales team members to understand how and why sales activities could be monitored and captured into the CRM system. This was a consulting and documentation exercise
- Modification of the Sales function within the Microsoft CRM system to include customised screens, views, drop downs and summary views that provided sales team members and sales management with the information they needed for their day-to-day activities
- Implementation of five business units within the Microsoft CRM system to match the lines of business
- Development and implementation of the security policies access to five different business units within the system
- Create management summary views within the CRM system to allow senior management to view sales and pipelines across line-of-business and product
- Creation of an entirely new entity within Microsoft CRM to track the sales of software licensing, software maintenance renewal dates, license-contacts and license keys. This entity required dedicated reporting and customized views, as well as custom training
- Basic re-training for existing and new staff to familiarise them with basic Microsoft CRM interfaces, with some specialised training for the users of the new license-management entity
- Conversion and import of data from an existing contact management system (ACT) into Microsoft CRM
- Satori had not invested in a test and development system, so RightServe provided a test-bed for the development of all these modifications. This became the user training and acceptance test area for the Satori Microsoft CRM system
- RightServe provided an ongoing support contract to Satori for additional system modifications, imports etc.
Delivery
Over a four week period, RightServe was able to assist Satori Group in:
- Analysis of the Satori Sales team functions to understand where and how Microsoft CRM could track and manage activities
- Setup and export of data to a test-and-development version of Satori’s Microsoft CRM system. This was hosted using the RightServe virtual server infrastructure, at a secure data centre
- Development, testing and training of the new Microsoft CRM customised views for the sales teams & management
- Development of the new License-management entity, in addition to development of testing and training for this
- After user acceptance, re-import into the production Satori Microsoft CRM system of all system modifications and data
- Data export from old existing sales system, cleaning and then import of data into the Microsoft CRM system
- Management report creation
- Training for users in NSW and Victoria.
Benefits to the Satori Group
- Single sales and contact system – Satori were able to achieve their objective of a single sales and contact tracking system in just over a month.
- Improved software licensing revenue – Satori are now able (through to use of the custom-built License entity in the Microsoft CRM system) to manage all aspects of their software sales, software maintenance and renewals in one system. The tight integration to Microsoft Excel allows users to draw live reports on sales pipelines, license statuses and renewals. This improves management information and lowers decision making time. This in turn means that revenue is invoiced and collected on time.
- Increased sales team efficiencies - through providing sales management with the right views on their product sales and sales team pipeline values, these can now be more easily be seen and tracked. This provided improved sales team decision making and improved revenue generation for the business.
- Improved Lead management – RightServe has provided Satori with a fast and efficient manner in which to load, allocate and manage new leads into the business. This ensures that new leads are followed up on, and that these are converted into revenue sooner.