Customer: Jim Malloy
Title: Vice President Sales
Company: Miyachi Unitek Corporation
Web: www.miyachiunitek.com

Q: What and how does your company sell?
A: Our company manufactures equipment to join materials and mark, such as laser welding, laser marking, hermetic sealing, soldering, and so forth, mostly for manufacturing companies in the medical, automotive, aerospace, and electronics industries. We have 15 regional sales managers around the world, each of which sells through five or six independent sales reps.

Q: How do you use salesforce.com?
A: We have a very content rich salesforce.com system, including price lists, Lab Application Cases, the ability to prepare quotes, track special orders, get reports on invoice and orders, and so forth. Most of our sales leads come from our Website, qualified by Inside Sales, and then tracked through the different stages of the sales cycle within salesforce.com. Our situation is a bit unusual because we provide salesforce.com to our channel partners, independent sales rep, as well as to our regional sales managers.

Q: How does that work?
A: When an independent sales rep wants to sell our product set, we pay for their salesforce.com license, but the payment comes out of their commission. We give half of the license fee back if they meet their sales quota and the other half if they meet our minimum requirements. We believe that offering salesforce.com in this way not only makes it easier for the independent reps to sell with all our content in salesforce.com, but also makes it more likely that they’ll bid our products rather than somebody else’s.

Q: Do you supply the computers, too?
A: In most cases, all a regional sales manager or an independent rep needs is a Treo smart phone. With just that device, a rep can get information via salesforce.com mobile on accounts, contacts, opportunities, tasks, calendar, and the price book. They can do everything from searching for a new opportunity, moving a sale to the next step in the tracking system, or generating a quote on the fly. They only need a laptop computer if they want to enter more detailed information.

Q: Why salesforce.com?
A: When we started looking at a system four years ago, we had a list of criteria. We wanted to be able to put all of our data (marketing, contact, opportunities, etc.) in one place. We also wanted something that was multilingual and as easy to use as Google or Amazon.com. We liked that salesforce.com was a subscription-based CRM application, so that we could stop using the product if the software vendor stopped enhancing it.

Q: Have you been happy with the relationship?
A: Oh, yes. They listen to their customers. They have an "idea exchange" where customers can add an idea and see rankings of other customers’ ideas. They always gather customer inputs for future product releases and have been updating a couple of times a year. In fact, salesforce.com keeps adding more features than we can get around to actually testing and using.

Q: What AppExchange software are you currently using?
A: We’re using a wide range of AppExchange extensions, including salesforce mobile, Pollzter, SalesGenius, Mass Update Contact Address, Mass Update Opportunity Close Dates, Mobile Admin Console, Vertical Response for AppExchange, and Adoption Dashboards.

Q: What do you like best about the entire setup?
A: We’ve been able to use the system to track lead conversion rates, so we know how well everyone is doing. This helps us hone our marketing dollars so that we’re focusing on getting leads that are more likely to result in customers. That’s traditionally very difficult to do in a channel sales situation, but with salesforce.com and AppExchange it’s fairly simple.