‘Growth by acquisition is part of our strategy, and a CRM system was needed to sit as a backbone to help make acquisitions rapidly,’ says Alan Edwards, marketing director of Netstore. ‘We had grown from a number of different places and had client data on disparate systems,’ he says.

‘Our legacy CRM system, which was run in-house, was difficult to administer, cost a lot in licence fees, had access problems, no built-in reporting capability and could not be customised to the growing business.’

Edwards says the company suffered because it could not forecast on a day-by-day basis what was happening in the pipeline.

‘We were reliant on the sales management structure and what information individual salespeople chose to share, as they were using their own approach to CRM,’ he says.

In 2005, Netstore purchased Siebel’s CRM On Demand system and migrated information held by individual salespeople on laptops and PDAs, its legacy CRM software and Excel spreadsheets to the new application. Oracle’s acquisition of Siebel did not discourage Edwards because he confirmed that the system is a strategic part of Oracle’s roadmap.

Since implementation, Netstore has acquired three more companies.

‘Each time we have been able to rapidly move new clients and opportunities to the Siebel system and now have one view of the customer, as all the information and interactions with individual clients are in one place. The more we learn about them, the more targeted we can be in our marketing,’ says Edwards.

The CRM system now gives Netstore total visibility into the database. ‘We can see what is going on in real-time,’ says Edwards.

Post-implementation, there are some things Netstore would have done differently.

‘We took a packaged one week of consultancy from Siebel,’ says Edwards. ‘It was invaluable but we could have taken advantage of more extensive training. As a result we may not be exploiting the full capability of the system and we have learned things along the way which we might have picked up quicker.’

‘We have gone down a few blind alleys and tinkered around with the system only to have to go back.’

In the future, Edwards says the company may take advantage of more formal training.

‘There is always lots going on and never time to stop, but we will make time to learn how to exploit the system more fully,’ he says.