Company Sales and Acquisitions (CSA) is a specialist team of business brokers, located in the heart of Auckland in Vulcan lane. The brokerage has traded for almost 20 years, which has been long enough to assist some businesses in changing hands more than once.

Recent growth in the size of the team, combined with new competitors entering the Auckland market, helped to encourage the consultancy’s owner to bite the bullet and invest in customer relationship management (CRM) software as part of a strategy to protect the firm’s leading position in the market over the long term.

Integrated electronic marketing
CSA relies very heavily on a large network of professionals, mostly accountants and lawyers, who are the ‘eyes and ears’ of the company. This trusted channel to the market has been built up over many years, and provides a vital link to potential buyers and sellers. Traditionally CSA had used a carefully managed, but more invasive communication strategy – the directors wanted to ‘raise the bar’.

The brokerage needed to find a way to communicate with this channel at high speed, and to let its network of professionals know about new business opportunities that could appeal to their clients, as they came to hand.

An important consideration was that CSA needed to achieve this in a slick and professional manner. Earlier, concept testing with free shareware broadcast software had confirmed that this was the correct approach.

CSA needed a fully integrated marketing and communications system, not just a stand-alone e-mail ‘blaster,’ and the software would have to be able to be adaptable to the brokerage’s unique business model.

After an initial survey showed that “off-theshelf” packages were unlikely to fit the bill, CSA started to discuss the project with CRM specialist Crossware.

Crossware sales manager Kenneth Fairgray says the project presented a number of challenges. “Confidentiality is naturally of paramount importance in this arena, and we were also determined to follow industry best-practice for permission-based electronic marketing. Last but not least, it was essential that Crossware made it as easy as possible for a broker to load a new opportunity and broadcast it to the entire marketplace within minutes, and without compromising the relationships, which had taken so long to build up.”

Fully hosted solution
Management at the brokerage were not keen on investing in expensive servers, or in up-skilling to manage complex new software systems. Both of these factors led Crossware to recommend a ‘fully hosted’ solution.

The hosted solution would also mean staff could access their new software using a web browser and would be free to work from home, at CSA’s base in town, at a client’s premises, or anywhere an internet connection was available.

While the solution would be hosted by Crossware, CSA would not be relinquishing any ownership rights to software, as Fairgray explains. “CSA owns the solution that we have built for them outright, in spite of the fact that it is currently hosted on a Crossware server. In time, as they grow, they will always have the option of bringing the application in house at any time.”

CSA had an excellent high-speed broadband connection, but it had limited network infrastructure and no IT staff – which were further factors lending themselves to Crossware’s fully hosted solution according to Fairgray.

CRM – But not as you know it
Crossware analysed the needs of the firm and came up with a highly customised application which evolved from using Crossware’s core CRM package as the starting point.

“Although we needed many of the classical features of CRM, our business model is unique,” says CSA managing director Matt Gumbley. “I do not believe that we could ever have located an ‘off-the-shelf ’ solution that would have catered to all of our needs.”

By selecting Crossware CRM as the foundational building block, CSA was able to greatly reduce its software development costs. Crossware CRM was procured for a one-off license fee, giving the brokerage the benefits of a tailor-made solution, but without a sky-high price tag.

Fairgray says Crossware’s CRM solution has become a significant player in the New Zealand marketplace over the last five years. He says this is partly due to the dependability of the IBM Domino engine under the bonnet, and partly because of Crossware’s passion for CRM and its readiness to modify its range of products to meet client’s exact needs. Over the years CSA has become increasingly involved in the sale of technology-based businesses. It was very important for CSA that its own IT systems were leading edge in every respect.

Market intelligence
Gumbley says Crossware assists with a process which is at the heart of its trading activity. “CSA’s database of potential buyers and sellers is our life-blood. The firm’s ‘market intelligence’ is one of our greatest assets, and using technology to assist in the process of matching a buyer and a seller makes a great deal of sense.”

Gumbley says Crossware worked hard to ensure that the system met CSA’s needs. “We used to produce a number of internal sales reports each week. We were particularly impressed by the way that the guys at Crossware incorporated all of these reports in the new system.

“We now receive all of the data that we were accustomed to reviewing together, and it is presented in our familiar in-house formats, but the hard slog to production has been one hundred percent removed. But above all else I am delighted that the use of email has been regulated so that our network of referrers will continue to want to hear from us.”

The future
So what does the future hold for CSA? Gumbley says the company has only recently gone live with Crossware’s system but it’s expecting to deal with a lot less paper work. Gumbley also expects the software will help the sales team to focus more on what it does best. “Personally I am looking forward to having absolutely everything I need to know, about both my current and former clients and vendors, right here at my fingertips.”

For more information

Paul Graham
General Manager
paul@crossware.co.nz
ph 09 379 7044

May 2006