CRM and Harmony

SalesPage Technologies' offers "Feng Shui for the eBusiness," according to a slogan displayed on the organization's Web page. SalesPage's customizable, Internet-ready customer relationship management applications, according to the slogan, "achieve greater harmony by the perfect arrangement of Web-based business solutions."

According to SalesPage Chief Executive Officer Greg Ozuzu, the slogan is just one of the messages chosen to describe the organization's offerings. "Another one we've chosen is 'space to connect,'" Ozuzu says. "Space to connect shows more of what we think about CRM and the way to do CRM today, which is making sure that no matter what you do, you're making it easy for users to take control and bring in all the facilities and systems they need to move their CRM solutions forward."

SalesPage, formerly called Unitrac, offers a CRM environment that allows users to create solutions that meet the specific requirements of a particular customer situation. Rather than providing an out-of-the-box application, SalesPage offers an open, flexible environment for creating eCRM solutions. The Developer Suite includes SalesPage studio, the SalesPage Enterprise Server, EAI Servers and the Mobile Device Integration Server for Palm and Windows CE handheld computing devices.

"We believe that when you give the users a very good starting point and open-ended environment for customization, it gives them a solution they can continue to work with and grow with," Ozuzu says.

SalesPage studio is a drag-and-drop e-business development environment that supports presentation layer features, wizards, images, data fields, cross-join capabilities and smart objects. While designed as a programming-free model, SalesPage studio can nonetheless support popular programming and scripting languages such as Visual Basic, Java, VBScript and JavaScript. Studio also supports development of e-business solutions for multiple devices, including PDAs, Web-enabled phones, and standard Web browsers.

The messaging-based Enterprise Server manages SalesPage user sessions, allocates resources, performs database management activities and communicates with other servers. The server runs entirely over TCP/IP and is built on an asynchronous message-oriented middleware architecture that allows organizations to integrate, build and extend complex distributed applications across different multiple hardware servers.

The SalesPage Express Integration Server works in tandem with the Enterprise Server to give users access to mission-critical applications and data. The Express Integration Server provides an architecture for integrating new and legacy applications into the e-business environment. Support is provided for HTML and XML templates, SXL style sheets, and third party XML specs. And the server integrates a multitier implementation of Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications, Java and popular scripting. The server also offers a solution for connecting, extending and integrating enterprise applications.

The SalesPage Mobile Device Server manages, formats and generates content for mobile devices.

"We've realized a lot of our users are going to be mobile professionals that aren't always going to be sitting there with Internet connections," Ozuzu says. "We've created an environment that makes it easy to have a Web-based solution running in connected or disconnected environments."

Implementation of the Developer Suite is simple, Ozuzu says. "Nobody has time anymore to wait and go through the discussion to convert data," he says. "Because we support a lot of technology [users] can climb on board fast. It doesn't require they go learn some crazy stuff to extend it."

Earning It

George Betzios, director of mutual fund operations with Salomon Smith Barney, says the need to provide contact management led his organization to SalesPage. Salomon Smith Barney, a subsidiary of Citigroup, is a global, full-service financial firm that provides investment banking and asset management services. Its customers vary from retail and institutional clients to high-net-worth individuals.

"We've got an internal and external sales force, and from a management point we wanted to be able to capture information about who was selling our products, what products they were selling, and keep notes on them," he says. "We also wanted to be able to track literature requests that came in from different channels--just really true contact management."

The need "runs from the retail level all the way up into the institutional level, so we're crossing a number of different marketing channels here," he says.

SalesPage will be used by each area to track contacts, sales, and notes, schedule activities, order literature, run campaigns and provide the tools to analyze what campaigns are effective, what products are being sold and identify cross selling opportunities, Betzios says.

The organization began beta-testing SalesPage in June and expects to have about 250 users on the system--a full roll out.

"Our experience with [SalesPage] in the past has shown us they have a flexible, open architecture and they have a willingness to support us," he says. "They also have a commitment to the financial services area and have written some really specific functionality for mutual funds."

Betzios anticipates the SalesPage technology will help take Salomon Smith Barney "where we want to be."

"Everyone's more comfortable using browser-type technology, so training will be easier," he says. "It will be an easier transition tool to get outside and inside people up and running and up to speed. From a support standpoint, it'll make it much easier to offer support across the entire enterprise. We won't have to worry about local synchronizing, so from that standpoint we see huge advantages."

At the same time, Betzios says, SalesPage addresses some concerns of the sales force. "The sales force has always been after a single, desktop application where they can do all their business from," he says. "Currently, there's nothing out there that comes close to it, but we're hoping this might solve the problem...I don't think there's a single product out there that can do everything, but with the flexibility of this system, we think we can get close."

As for the return on investment, Betzios says, "I think the learning curve will decrease and we can spend a lot less time training internal sales forces. I think that's where I'm going to get my biggest savings, and because of the flexibility of the product, any kind of changes will mean a quick turnaround time for the reps. And any time I can get to a single desktop application for them, my marketing people will love me."