Concierge Communications Expects to Double Growth and Revenue with Online Sales Portal

Worldwide, companies of all sizes are moving to cloud computing, capitalizing on its immense benefits.  In today’s post we hear from Concierge Communications on why they chose Microsoft in their move to cloud computing!

		“We expect that our SharePoint Online-based sales portal will allow us to double our independent agent network and revenues in 2011. Sales agents perceive the portal as a huge competitive advantage.”
		Clark Atwood, Vice President, Concierge Communications

Concierge Communications
Concierge Communications helps companies identify the best, most cost-effective communications devices and services for their needs. As a growing communications broker, it represents more than 40 communications and technology providers, including landline, Voice over IP (VoIP), wireless service and phones, data services, mobile fleet management software and services, telecom expense management software, and many other innovations.

IT Challenges
Success in this business depends on identifying and packaging the best suite of products, services, and prices for a customer before the competition does. The sales support team was challenged, having  to help salespeople and independent agents manually slice through reams of documents from dozens of vendors to quickly find a match for each customer’s needs. As Concierge Communications grew both its provider portfolio and its sales network, it was more difficult to make these matches quickly. Furthermore, the company had sales materials located in dozens of internal servers and provider websites. Lack of centralized tools in a single platform to support independent sales agents hurt the company’s effort to recruit these agents.

“Communications brokers that can efficiently support the consultative sales process are the ones that are growing and successful,” says Clark Atwood, Vice President of Concierge Communications. “We’ve been very successful, but it was getting more difficult to scale that success with the sales-support processes we had in place and the quickening pace of business. Customers expect quick, accurate responses and we found ourselves getting bogged down with more and more requests.” 

Solution
Because its 14 sales staff members worked in the field and its 95 independent sales agents were located all over the United States, Concierge Communications was reluctant to invest in an on-premises communications infrastructure. “I was very familiar with on-premises installations and did not want to support email or file servers all over the country and maintain hardware, applications, and a complex directory infrastructure,” Atwood says. “We were convinced that a cloud-based service would best fit our needs, and we wanted to work with a company that had a long-term strategy”.

Concierge Communications already used Microsoft software on its desktop computers, and for many business functions, and so investigated the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS), part of Microsoft Online Services, as a solution.

Concierge looked briefly at Google Apps cloud offering but rejected it because at the time, Google did not allow Concierge to create a backup of its own data. Also, says Atwood, “Their tools were not up to par with the Microsoft tools and we wanted to build on the Microsoft investment we already had. There was no need to rip and replace if our current infrastructure and skills could be leveraged effectively.”

“The Business Productivity Online Standard Suite gave us a way to grow in any location with no infrastructure support costs,” Atwood says. “The centralized email, calendar-sharing, and collaboration sites would give us a way to make our sprawling employee base a tight, cohesive team again.”

Concierge Communications engaged Strategic SaaS, a Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner that specializes in helping companies move to BPOS. Strategic SaaS provided technical direction, advice on connecting smartphones, and tips on using Business Productivity Online Standard Suite.

Benefits
The most impressive thing that Concierge Communications has done with BPOS is in the area of collaboration. With no outside assistance, the company built an intranet and a sales portal by using SharePoint Online. By working with Microsoft SharePoint Designer and the tools and wizards in SharePoint Online, Concierge created two rich, well-organized collaboration portals that employees and salespeople use as their respective, “go-to” resource for finding information.

With its new sales portal, Concierge Communications has streamlined its sales processes to the point where it anticipates the ability to double its agent staff and revenues in 2011.

Salespeople and Concierge Communications management alike love the self-serve efficiency of the portal. “The new paradigm is to check the sales portal first, and then contact sales support,” Atwood says. “We figure if we can save one hour of our sales-support team’s time each month, the tool pays for itself, and we believe we are already achieving this.”

Besides paying for itself, the sales portal is saving the company money. “Since launching the sales portal, we’ve added 3 full-time salespeople and 12 new independent agents, with no increase in sales-support staff,” Atwood says. “That’s a savings of one full-time person, a cost avoidance of about [U.S.] $50,000 a year.”

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