Cliftons' 5-fold jump in business with Goldmine CRM
FrontRange Goldmine CRM is helping the company streamline, co-ordinate and measure its sales and marketing efforts across nine locations in three countries. "We now acquire 50 new clients a month," explains general manager Matthew Longmore (pictured)...
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Cliftons operates 150 purpose-built computer training, seminar and videoconferencing rooms in nine locations spanning Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. The facilities are used by many of Asia Pacific’s leading professional organisations and government departments, including ANZ Bank and Vodafone. The company has grown consistently at over 30 percent year-on-year since it was established in 1997 and now employs over 110 staff. The challenge “The primary concern for Clifton’s was that our valuable customer information was left in the hands of individual staff and walked out the door each day at 6pm,” explains Matthew Longmore, general manager of Cliftons. “If someone was away the following day, we needed to be able to step in and take care of their appointments and calls.” Synchronising customer data for centralised access quickly became Cliftons’ top priority. “As we grew we started to use direct mail-outs of up to 8,000 pieces every two months to build our brand awareness in the market,” says Longmore. “We’d easily spend six or seven hours comparing the different versions of the database to generate a campaign list because of the duplication of the data and lack of a synchronised database system.” The solution “GoldMine not only came in at the right price point but, more importantly, it had the functionality and potential to scale to meet our changing needs,” says Longmore. “We also liked the usability, ease of administration, as we could maintain it internally, and the synchronisation capabilities.” Cliftons now manages in excess of 5,000 contacts in GoldMine in New Zealand, including approximately 3,000 primary contacts, over 50,000 contacts in Australia and a further 12,000 contacts in a linked GoldMine system in Hong Kong. The results More significantly, GoldMine has enabled Cliftons to embark on an electronic marketing strategy for the first time. “Electronic marketing means we can add a lot more dynamic features to the information we send out – from direct links through to our website to offering access to a free virtual tour of our state-of-the-art training facilities. Using GoldMine, we can create emails as a template and apply filters to ensure we send only to clients who have expressed an interest in receiving email communication, ensuring compliance with antispam laws,” says Longmore. The transition to email marketing has resulted in a strong, measurable increase in traffic to the Cliftons websites. The New Zealand site gets in excess of 8,000 hits per month compared to 1,000 from just six months ago. This is on a volume of approximately 4,000 emails sent out every eight weeks. Response rates to direct marketing campaigns – whether offline or electronic – have also increased markedly. “We now acquire 50 new clients a month on average, compared to 10 to 15 per month before GoldMine,” says Longmore. GoldMine has also enabled Cliftons to automate its booking confirmation process, eliminating unnecessary work and double handling. Furthermore, the company can now drill down on the day-to-day activities of sales representatives - information which feeds back into their key performance indicators (KPIs) for remuneration purposes. “Having GoldMine has really enabled us to grow and mature in that respect,” says Longmore. For more information
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May 2007
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