At AOL Advertising, Cloud Computing Boosts Pipeline Visibility and Efficiencies

Challenge

• AOL Advertising—the industry's largest domestic digital advertising network, based on reach—needed to effectively manage sales, increase pipeline visibility, and integrate with systems.
• AOL Advertising, which includes AOL’s leading media properties and more, wanted to consolidate multiple existing instances of Salesforce CRM globally.
• The ability to provide a unified view while supporting different processes for multiple business units was key.
• The solution also had to integrate with the company’s order management systems.

Solution

• AOL Advertising upgraded to Salesforce CRM Unlimited Edition, consolidating over 1000 users across several business groups on one instance of Salesforce CRM in just 3 months.
• The company integrated salesforce.com with its order management systems, which in turn feed the company’s adservers.
• Using Force.com workflow management the company can efficiently support pre- and post-sales functions.
• Salesforce.com Premier Support helps to customize Salesforce CRM beyond a mere transactional tool.
• Dashboards and reports are easily created to track sales activities.

Results

• AOL Advertising's sales team now shares information more efficiently and works more cooperatively—reducing duplicate effort and wasted time.
• Armed with a tool that better manages opportunities, sellers now focus on those with the highest probability to close, driving revenue.
• Salesforce CRM provides better visibility into the sales pipeline.
• The company also benefits from better reporting for management. Managers use dashboards to track the activity levels of their teams--from how many calls are made to how many meetings take place.
• The cloud computing model means AOL Advertising can quickly make customizations to meet its unique business needs.