Billian's HealthDATA Uses Access Hoover's On Salesforce AppExchange To Enrich Current Customer Data and Identify New Customers

Business Roadblock

Billian's HealthDATA employees needed a tool to help them quickly and easily enrich the information they had on existing customers. This information was becoming stale and getting harder to keep updated on a regular basis. The time constraints shared by all within this small workgroup were hindering everyone's ability to properly maintain and build upon customer information.

Billian's sales teams were reliant upon the customer records they had collected over a period of time using various third-party applications like ACT. This information wasn't entirely accurate or complete. The sales reps needed additional company data, like revenue and employee counts, in order to price their product and figure out who their ideal target customers were. Billian's sales reps didn't have access to industry SIC or NAICS Codes and they had to try to add revenue and employee counts by cutting and pasting record by record - a nearly impossible project.

Solution

The challenge for any sales organization is that the information used is only as good as the people who are updating it. For Billian's HealthDATA, that's where Access Hoover's on AppExchange comes in.

"Before signing on with Access Hoover's, I turned a sales administrator loose on a customer data updating project, and it never got done," said John Brooke, General Manager for Billian's HealthDATA. "It was a daunting task that proved to be impossible. We gave up after about a month. Once we launched Access Hoover's, I personally updated 1,000 company records in a matter of days."

Now, with Access Hoover's, when Billian's sales reps go to a trade show and collect business cards, for example, or when they follow up on lead forms, they quickly convert the leads to accounts in salesforce.com. Then, to get more information about the company, they click on Access Hoover's.

From here, they can "stare and compare" to see what's in their salesforce.com database about that prospect and what's in Access Hoover's about that prospect and then update that record with correct data. Access Hoover's also allows them to add more contact names and view Family Tree information so they can gain a better idea of who they're working with, as well as identify additional potential customers.

"The biggest value of Access Hoover's for us is the ability to quickly and easily enrich the data on our existing customers," continued Brooke. "Then we're able to take the results of this data enrichment to create a complex query using Hoover's Build A List tool to find additional prospects we didn't even know existed. It's very rare that you'll search for a company record that Hoover's doesn't have. We have a lot of smaller companies who are clients, and 9 times out of 10, those records exist on Hoover's, which is pretty amazing."

Bottom Line

Access Hoover's has not only saved Billian's HealthDATA invaluable time, it has enhanced the sales teams' ability to understand the complexity of their customers. In addition, Access Hoover's allows the sales reps to, with the click of a button, update only the information they're interested in changing.

They can also figure out where their customers are coming from so that they can build lists of other companies that meet those criteria, and then use that information to load additional leads back into salesforce.com. Access Hoover's has proven to be a key component in Billian's "full circle" sales process.

"We anticipate that Access Hoover's will help increase our profitability because we've been able to uncover and learn about new organizations that are like the ones we currently sell to - that we wouldn't have known about before," said Brooke.

"I've tried a couple of competing products, and they weren't as impressive as Access Hoover's. For my money, Hoover's delivers the better product, and its pricing model makes it very affordable for small businesses," Brooke added. "As far as customer service goes, we are not a giant organization but we get treated like the big guys do at Hoover's, and that's important."