CMIT Solutions supports more independently owned franchisees who provide high-level IT services to small and medium-sized businesses. CMIT provides the tools, systems, and corporate support franchisees need to grow their businesses.
- Industry:IT
- Size: $24 million +
- # of Franchisees: 900+
Highlights
By adding Cirrus Insight's application to franchisees’ email accounts, CMIT was able to:
The Challenge
Driving effective marketing for franchisees needed complete and accurate data from the field.
CMIT wanted to do more and better centralized persona-based marketing and uncover new business opportunities for its franchisees. Capturing and maintaining clean customer data was very important to validate their brand message and value proposition to the market.
But franchisees were simply too busy servicing their client to take time for a task with seemingly no value —data entry into Salesforce Community Cloud.
That meant CMIT couldn’t get the critical information such as:
- Lead source - where are leads coming from
- Industry information
- Key client activity data around meetings scheduled
- Personas—the individual roles the franchisees were working with
No supported Community Cloud email integration
Salesforce email integration products; Salesforce for Outlook and Salesforce Lightning do not support Community Cloud. While most of CMIT Solutions’ franchisees used Outlook as their email provider, they needed to support a wide range of email services, including Gmail and Office 365, in order to accommodate all of their franchisees and collect as much data as possible.
Previous integration options either failed to support a wide enough range of email services, weren’t compatible with Community Cloud, or proved to be unreliable and error-prone.
Franchisee Experience
CMIT was committed to providing a solid process to its franchisees that would help them be more effective in their work and grow efficiently. Having a Salesforce Email integration was a feature that was highly requested by CMIT franchisees.
Salesforce Community Cloud solved CMIT Solutions’ need for a centralized place to store all customer and franchise data; however, Community Cloud does not provide many of the out-of-box features that a full Salesforce license offers, such as inbox sync and sidebar functionality.
No way to quickly enter customer data from mobile devices
To make the situation even more challenging, field representatives had no fast or reliable way to enter customer data into Community Cloud from their mobile device while conducting in-person meetings. In particular, field reps expressed a strong desire for a mobile app that would allow them to scan business cards and intelligently capture contact information in order to create the contact in their Community Cloud account.
THE SOLUTION
Cirrus Insight automates data collection so franchisees can focus on their clients. Not data entry.
When CMIT’s Franchise Solutions Manager, Adrianne Marquez, read a comment in the AppExchange about Cirrus Insight's ability to integrate email with Salesforce Community Cloud, she knew she needed to learn more. If Cirrus Insight could connect Outlook to Community Cloud, it would be a game changer for her organization.
CMIT added Cirrus Insight to each franchisee’s email account on a hosted exchange server. Then Cirrus Insight went to work—automating the transfer of email and calendar data to Salesforce Community Cloud.
CMIT Solutions found that Cirrus Insight also provides many other features that enable their franchisees to make data-driven decisions, save time, and close more deals:
Automatic calendar sync + meeting scheduling
CMIT Solutions began using Cirrus Insight to give their franchisees the ability to automatically sync all of their customer interaction and sales activity data such as meetings, and contact details from their Outlook, Office 365, or Gmail account directly into Salesforce Community Cloud.
Calendar sharing
Cirrus Insight also made the process of scheduling meetings with customers automatic, easy, and convenient. With Cirrus Insight, reps can now send their clients a URL link to view a calendar of all of the franchisee’s available times. The client can then select the day, time, and meeting type that works best for them, and book the meeting instantly. There’s no more back-and-forth, which means more meetings get scheduled, and more deals are won.
Mobile app + business card scanning
Franchisees also used Cirrus Insight's mobile app to integrate directly with Salesforce Community Cloud, allowing them to quickly and easily file emails, log calls, view and create tasks, and manage their pipeline on the go. Franchisee’s use Cirrus Insight's business card scanning feature to intelligently capture contact details into Community Cloud, again eliminating manual data entry, and saving valuable time.
THE RESULTS
Complete data and insights needed to drive better marketing and growth for franchisees.
With Cirrus Insight, CMIT was able to dramatically improve data collection without requiring franchisees to change their behavior. CMIT got:
Valuable insights for improved decision-making and increased sales.
Cirrus Insight helped uncover new insights and data that helped them accurately project revenue, run smarter marketing campaigns, and drive more sales opportunities for their franchisees.
Value proposition validation
CMIT Solutions is committed to providing more value of their franchisees. By providing the functionality to easily capture critical data, using customized simple dropdown fields, CMIT is being able to validate value propositions and improve marketing messages along the entire buyer’s journey.
Increased franchisee satisfaction
The elimination of time-consuming, tedious, manual data entry meant less stress and frustration for franchisees, higher satisfaction, and more time for enjoyable activities that directly contribute to business growth.