Although some staff were using ACT! by Sage, the best-selling contact manager from Sage Software, the majority of Avnet’s customer data was recorded in systems based on Lotus Notes. We knew we could take that only so far,” recalls Greg Stoner, Avnet’s director of CRM architecture. Avnet chose Sage SalesLogix over several possible solutions, including Siebel, Onyx, and Pivotal, because it not only meets their technology needs from a sales force automation perspective, but because the product offers the flexibility and integration capabilities the organization required.

“We wanted to turn our reps’ account info into an asset of the company’s while providing a true value to our reps using the system,” Stoner explains. “The idea was to get all that data in one bucket, stabilize it, and make it usable as a whole.”

That initial implementation was, Stoner says, “very typical” with employees using Sage SalesLogix primarily for sales force automation, working remotely, and synchronizing their individual databases with the company’s main database. However, based on high user adoption rates, Sage SalesLogix Support was added, the implementation was further customized, and the entire install was upgraded to work entirely over the Web.

“With the success of Sage SalesLogix within our organization, when the need arose for a call management system to provide technical support to our resellers, we immediately thought of Sage SalesLogix Support,” Stoner says. It took just 60 days to get up and running. The system has been getting quite a workout, with 10,000 support tickets being written each month. In fact, Stoner says, “We’ve been so successful that we’ve had a major computer and peripherals manufacturer sign three contracts with us to provide support for some of their products.”

Those contracts generate $2 million dollars annually for Avnet, making Sage SalesLogix not only a CRM product for Avnet, but a relationship management solution for external partners and customers.

The next step was migrating the team to the Sage SalesLogix Web client and integrating Sage SalesLogix with multiple other business management information such as historical sales data, work in progress information, returns, and quotes and orders.

“We found the rapid development of new features and functions with the Web client to be very powerful,” Stoner says. “And, this provided us with a flexible platform to build upon as our company continues to grow. Once we achieved our initial goal, the next steps were incremental and, from our point of view, had almost no costs associated with them with major benefits to the users.”

With almost 700 employees that range from administrative assistants to executive staff using Sage SalesLogix, the implementation has grown, as Stoner puts it, into “a customer-centric portal for our sales reps.”

“ The sales reps just rave about all the customizations

we have done because they provide access to critical

data, at the click of a button,” Stoner says. “And,

overall, Sage SalesLogix has provided significant

improvement in sales rep productivity with a 20

percent across-the-board time savings, as well as

23 hours a week time savings on reporting and

forecasting from a business unit.”

Every month of the rollout, the CRM team built customizations that provided immediate value to the sales reps in order to demonstrate their focus on delivering a system with true value to the end user. With the move to the Web, reps could check the status of a customer’s orders and even hot link to the tracking systems of shipping carriers such as FedEx and UPS®

Another big hit with the sales team was the Sales History button. “Salespeople can see across all product lines, how much a customer has bought this year, versus last year, and a rolling 12-month total,” says Stuttard.

“The sales reps just rave about all the customizations we have done because they provide access to critical data, at the click of a button,” Stoner says. “And, overall, Sage SalesLogix has provided significant improvement in sales rep productivity with a 20 percent across-the board time savings, as well as 23 hours a week time savings on reporting and forecasting from a business unit.”