Salesnet Rolls out Verticalized CRM Solutions

Provider offers customer relationship management for telecom services, commercial lending, advertising/media sales

Provider offers customer relationship management for telecom services, commercial lending, advertising/media sales

Boston, MA — June 15, 2004 — Solution provider Salesnet this week rolled out what it is touting as the "on-demand" customer relationship management (CRM) industry's first generally available industry-specific editions, focusing on telecommunications services, commercial lending and advertising/media sales.

Salesnet said that these out-of-the-box vertical editions are preconfigured with industry processes intended to define, guide and track sales success. "Our vertical strategy is based on the premise that industry-specific editions must have industry-specific processes," said Dan Starr, chief marketing officer at Salesnet.

In Salesnet's view, telecom companies, after slowly recovering from recent economic conditions, are now beginning to invest in new technologies that deliver fast return on investment as they start to refocus on building growth and momentum. The provider said its Salesnet Telecommunications Services Edition is designed to fulfill the needs of today's telecom service providers selling wired and wireless voice and data services.

The edition includes telecom-specific processes that serve as a virtual sales guide for end users directly into the application. It also offers detailed reporting and dashboards to monitor telecom sales performance. Additionally, Salesnet said it has extended the underlying application structure to support the capture of familiar industry data, such as products billed by either a monthly recurring charge (MRC) or a non-recurring charge (NRC).

The Commercial Lending and Advertising/Media Sales edition include capabilities similarly configured to support sales processes in those sectors.

"Preconfigured solutions can cost-effectively jump-start a business' CRM deployment by tailoring to its industry's, and its own, unique ways of doing business; thereby bringing closer the promise of competitive advantage," said Joe Outlaw, president of Outlaw Research. "In evaluating verticalized applications, businesses must look beyond the easily added cosmetic changes, such as industry templates and terminology, to the fundamental ability of the applications to support industry-specific data structures and customer-focused business processes. Preconfigured workflows, based on flexible and easily modifiable workflow technology like Salesnet's are the real keys to vertical applications. Without them, you only have window-dressing."

All the new editions are available immediately. Pricing includes a subscription-based license fee for Salesnet Extended ($99 per month/user), with an additional $5 per month/per user fee for each edition.

Salesnet first announced its configuration-as-a-service platform in February 2004 as part of its overall "guided performance selling," or GPS for sales, strategy. With configuration-as-a-service, Salesnet said it has expanded the "as-a-service" model by delivering preconfigured vertical industry and sales methodology-focused CRM solutions.

Salesnet's first preconfigured sales methodology application, Salesnet CustomerCentric Selling (CCS) Edition, was announced in April 2004. The company also plans to release another round of industry-specific editions this September.

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