About the Client

Angie’s List, Inc. provides consumer reviews of local services across the U.S. and parts of Canada. Their reports describe first-hand experiences with local service providers; containing information on project cost, grade the company’s response time, prices, and quality of work in over 500 categories of service. Anchored in Indianapolis, Angie’s List is a membership-based service with over 750,000 subscribers nationwide.

Business Challenge

Angie’s List experienced a failed attempt at CRM using Microsoft Dynamics. They had been able to maintain increased revenues using their current homegrown processes, but as the company grew, there was a clear need to track and maintain sales efforts. Ad sales reps did not have a formal sales process nor did they have a technology to support it. Instead, they maintained their own pipeline, daily tasks, and any customer or prospect notes in a variety of separate systems. This was an arduous multi-step process- representing approximately 8 steps for a sales rep to identify a phone number and dial it. In addition, management was unable to easily view the sales pipeline and track status of leads.

Our Approach & Benefits

Understanding that user adoption is key to project success, Sakonent performed a top to bottom business review and audit of Angie’s List’s existing CRM landscape and sales process. Sakonent implemented Salesforce.com and utilized Service Cloud Console as an interaction center. Custom dashboards and reports were created based on input from the ad sales team, ensuring usability. This produced new inventory and quote capabilities that allowed for greater efficiency, flexibility and accessibility. To their surprise, Angie’s List was able to utilize the incremental improvements delivered during the project to increase sales and avoid the any drop in productivity. By project end, Angie’s List had 100% user adoption. Information is now easy shared among sales reps, administration, and management and informed decisions are made based on real time data.

Results

• Project completed and training delivered in 11 weeks
• End user training to 280 users
• Real-time reporting
• Outstanding user adoption with immediate pipeline visibility
• Salesforce.com is now the foundation for Angie’s List Ad Sales organization

"We partnered with Sakonent because we wanted to quickly and dramatically improve our sale team’s efficiency. We’ve not been disappointed.”

–Matt Dooley, Director of Sales Operations