February 26, 2011
Challenge
Dow Jones needed to unite 300 advertising sales reps from 17 different business groups, and 4 properties, onto a single CRM platform, thereby creating a single repository for all customer contact and account information; improving visibility and communication of customer information to all teams; enabling accurate, centralized revenue forecasting and reconciling forecasts against actuals; integrating Salesforce with Oracle based customer data warehouse; and creating an automated rate calculation and quoting process for sales.
Solution
Dow Jones selected Bluewolf, the only salesforce.com partner with the combined knowledge, tools and experience to deliver and guarantee success with Salesforce. Bluewolf’s approach also enabled Dow Jones to deliver against an aggressive time table. The initial launch was within 8 weeks, and 300 employees were trained across 8 regions within 2 weeks. Bluewolf’s Integrator was used to integrate Salesforce with Oracle 11i Customer Data Warehouse.
Results
The advertising division at Dow Jones is able to respond quickly to new sales strategies and/or changing organizational needs. Adoption and acceptance of the system has delivered significant productivity enhancements, new business insights and important management benefits. Divisional forecasting time was reduced from 2 weeks to 1 day, forecasting accuracy jumped from 60% to 90%, Sales Rep Activity reports are now generated automatically, the rate calculation and quoting process is generated in minutes as opposed to hours, and the time to market delivery has improved 3 times.
