Case Study: How Ashland Used salesforce.com

COMPANY: Ashland Distribution is a major division of Ashland, Inc., a $7 billion a year firm.
BUSINESS: Ashland Distribution buys chemicals and plastics, and then blends and repackages them for distribution in Europe and North America.
CHALLENGE: No way to track orders. Customers and sales reps alike were using fax, email, and phone to track customer service activity. No way to share order information with the supply chain to ensure timely delivery of raw materials.
IMPLEMENTATION: Ashland tested the feasibility of salesforce.com with the demonstration version, and then ran a pilot with eight users. When that proved successful, Ashland rolled out a contact center solution to more than 200 service agents. Ashland then deployed salesforce.com to 50 sales reps in three months and ultimately to over 1,000 users in sales and customer service organizations.
CUSTOMIZATION: salesforce.com Professional Services provided application and integration design expertise to integrate SAP’s customer master, vendor master, and materials master data across 2,500 potential users companywide. Custom tabs, along with customized Web links, were designed to prevent inefficiencies in the sales process and provide workflow to the sales cycle.
EXTENSION: Leads are routed from district managers to individual salespeople. Dashboards reveal all activities pertaining to issues and discrepancies to keep everyone on the same page. Service agents track calls by type and log multiple calls from a single customer. Ashland’s supply chain was incorporated into the system and can view service histories for customers.
ANALYSIS: This engagement provides a role model in two areas:

1. The gradualist approach. All too often companies buying into CRM try to do too much too quickly. They bring CRM capability online and then send out a memo demanding that everybody in the sales organization attend training and use the new system. This often creates massive resentment because the sales team isn’t “sold” on why they should use the system. They quickly view CRM as an impediment to getting work done and mentally treat it as a management fad that (hopefully) will run its course. The Ashland approach is much wiser. By gradually introducing new capabilities, first with a demo, then with a pilot, then with one group, and finally to the entire organization, Ashland gave employees time to understand what was happening and to see the benefits accruing inside each department as it moved onto the system.

2. The prioritized rollout. Ashland and salesforce.com started the production rollout inside the contact center, which is the group where CRM was most likely to have an immediate positive impact. Because customers were getting frustrated with Ashland’s ability to track customer service, getting that part of the company “fixed” with new technology immediately removed a major thorn in the side of the customer relationship. Once that had been successfully deployed, it was time to bring the sales reps on board, so that they could both continue to populate the database and make use of the customer service data. Brilliant. Only then was the CRM capability moved out into the rest of the organization (such as Marketing), thereby building on the success of the other groups. Finally, the capability was extended outside the corporation to the supply chain. The rule here is: start with a big win and then build momentum as you move the application into the rest of the organization.