Actian > Case Studies > Transforming Salesforce CRM Data into Actionable Customer 360 Insights

Transforming Salesforce CRM Data into Actionable Customer 360 Insights

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

Equipment & Machinery
Retail

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Track & Trace of Assets

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

About The Customer

The customer is a mid-size enterprise software vendor based in California. The company offers an integrated portfolio of data management and data analytics products to customers operating in industries ranging from retail and manufacturing to financial services and healthcare. The company’s customer base is global and its revenues exceed $100M annually. In a market crowded with big names such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle, the sales and marketing teams at this mid-sized company without high brand recognition had their jobs cut out for them. To succeed, they needed to make every customer interaction count—to deliver an “ideal” customer experience, regardless of whether the customer was well known and long established or an entirely new prospect.

The Challenge

A mid-size enterprise software vendor, based in California, was struggling to optimize its sales and marketing operations in response to market disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite major investments in solutions from Salesforce, Marketo, and other vendors, the company was unable to gain a comprehensive 360-degree view of its customers. The individual apps feeding into Salesforce CRM were providing only fragments of the total customer picture, and the Salesforce CRM solution itself was unable to present these fragmented pictures as quickly as the company’s fast-moving go-to-market initiatives demanded. The full, 360-degree customer view, accessible in real time, continued to elude the company. The advent of the Covid-19 pandemic had disrupted the dynamics of commerce like nothing in recent history. Uncertain economic conditions threatened to affect both the company and its customers, and the company needed to be able to respond more quickly and appropriately to customer needs and opportunities.

The Solution

The company turned to the Actian Data Platform, a hybrid-cloud data warehouse integration and management platform, to aggregate and analyze data from all systems containing critical customer information. This platform provided a powerful yet cost-effective means of rapidly aggregating data from all the systems containing critical customer information—including Salesforce CRM and the other marketing, sales automation, and transactional tools in use within the company. Actian also provides powerful customer 360 analytics capabilities that make it easy for non-IT users to run sophisticated analytics and visualization tools—in real time—to gain insights from the aggregated data. The Actian Data Platform is offered as a managed service available through AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. It can also be deployed on-premises, in multi-cloud configurations, or even in a hybrid configuration that spans all these options.

Operational Impact

With Actian, the company saw significant improvements at every stage of the customer journey. Real time aggregation and analysis of data from multiple systems—including Salesforce CRM—led to more effective micro segmentation and persona targeting, lead qualification, faster conversion from MQL to opportunities, and shorter sales cycles. The company was able to identify the operational go-to-market enhancements they needed to make. Actian Data Platform has enabled the company to become much more agile and data-driven by enriching its ability to gain real-time insights from unified but dynamic datasets. Users can run a single report that, because it analyzes data from multiple sources simultaneously, provides a better understanding of an effort’s effectiveness. The insights are more accurate, are delivered in milliseconds, and enable decision-makers at all levels of the company to understand how well the efforts are working.

Quantitative Benefit

The company recouped the entire cost of its Actian Data Platform deployment in the first week by moving historical data from expensive Salesforce storage to low-cost Actian storage.
By deploying Actian Data Platform in the cloud, the company saved nearly $100K in the first few days—simply by offloading historical data stored in Salesforce to Actian Data Platform.
The company also avoided more than $1 Million in other software app/platform costs and consulting fees, which it had anticipated incurring before it opted to use Actian Data Platform.