Invicta’s Thrill of Victory

The cobbler’s children are alive and well—and shoeless—in the high-technology world: Companies focused on providing solutions to customers often neglect their own infrastructures. Invicta Wireless was such a company before it started using LongJump’s platform to deliver new applications for its sales and service teams.

Invicta Wireless itself serves as a support mechanism for other wireless businesses, acting as master dealer, branding expert, and service provider. “Our mission is to design, provide, and support high-quality products and services for independent wireless dealers to keep them competitive in the wireless marketplace,” says Asif Ahmed, Invicta’s founder and principal. “The solutions we design are cost-effective and can effortlessly be plugged into their current infrastructure.”

Unfortunately, Invicta had suffered from the cobbler’s dilemma since its 2005 founding. “Even though cell phones are very advanced—with cameras, video screens, and text—most operators still do business in the old way,” Ahmed says. “We make heavy use of IP technology to manage cellular-technology sales and service,” he adds, noting that keeping it all in line was a challenge. “We constantly search for new ideas and emerging technologies to improve our infrastructure and deploy new services to empower our partners.”

The problems were most noticeable in the sales department. Invicta had very little useful information on its customers’ target markets, or institutional memory of customers’ preferences, so each pitch was hit-or-miss. There were also inefficiencies in the sales process, but they were hard to identify because of the lack of analytics.

Ahmed began looking to combine good off-the-shelf CRM and sales force automation capabilities with a robust development environment. “I looked at Oracle, since I had experience with it, and Salesforce.com, [but] I knew LongJump was the right technology the moment I found it,” Ahmed says. “What took seven months to design with Oracle 9i, working with a full staff, I could do alone in LongJump in two weeks.”

And business has been good since implemention in February 2008. Very good, in fact: Sales jumped 300 percent in the next three-month period, despite only having 75 percent of the business mapped into LongJump. This success was in part due to Invicta’s use of LongJump’s predictive analytics to cross-sell and upsell the right product to the right segment, leading to an increase in average revenue per user. Customizing the LongJump fields with key customer-trait profiles helped to better identify customer profiles.

Invicta also increased productivity and lowered the amount of time it took to convert leads to prospects and prospects to customers. And customer service improved as the company became better able to address bottlenecks quickly and streamline its processes. “LongJump will adapt to your business—that’s the biggest benefit,” Ahmed says. “It lets the businessperson do what they envision without needing to explain that vision to IT.”

Invicta’s success with LongJump is so compelling that he’s lobbying his own customers to use the platform-as-a-service provider. “We want to bring LongJump to other companies,” he says. So much so, in fact, that Ahmed is presently considering a partnership with LongJump as a reseller or integrator. 

THE PAYOFF:
By automating its processes with LongJump, Invicta Wireless:

• increased sales 300 percent in three months;
• gained insight into customer needs for cross-sell and upsell;
• streamlined its sales and customer service processes; and
• gained a potential new source of revenue as a possible LongJump partner.

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