Line of Business
CRM on demand works wonders for Canadian "voice talent" firm
Voices.com, an online marketplace for voice talent, uses "CRM on demand" from Salesforce.com to manage various aspects of its rapidly growing business. Salesforce.com helps the online firm identify long-term opportunities -- and missed ones -- becoming the central hub for all decision-making. INCLUDES VIDEO.4/17/2009 5:00:00 AM By: Shane Schick
If David Ciccarelli were providing the voice-over for a movie trailer about the global recession, it would probably sound pretty ominous.
Those deep, sombre tones you hear on TV, at the multiplex or on the Web often come through the services of Voices.com, a London, Ont.-based online business Ciccarelli founded in 2004 with a partner.
VIDEO: Featuring Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli
The company works with ad agencies, film producers such as DreamWorks and major networks, including NBC, ABC and the History Channel. It also signs up voice-over talent and finds them work. Although film shoots in Los Angeles recently slumped to their lowest level ever, according to news reports, Ciccarelli says Voices.com is managing to weather the storm.
“There are concerns from voice talent. They're basically freelancers who provide these services, so they worry about how they'll be affected,” he says. “So far, we've been pretty resilient.”
That resilience may be due in part to Voices.com's ability to effectively organize and manage its sales data.
Ciccarelli says the firm, which employs about a dozen people, has become a big proponent of Salesforce.com and has been working with the on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) system to identify missed opportunities – or long-term ones.
“We use Salesforce.com as the central hub for all decision-making and examining what the reports are telling us in terms of why a client's making purchases, or why they're not,” he says.
Voices.com recently customized one of those reports by adding a “reason why” field to section about customers that decided not to use its services.
“We're maybe not winning as many deals as we used to, so why is that? Now we just added some typical reasons (in the system), like money's tight, the economic climate is too bad, or they're pushing the decision off for three to six months. So now despite us losing the deal today, we can start planning for that in the future. If money's tight, money's tight, but when things turn around, those are the people we can reach out to.”
Page Navigation 1) Discovering why a client's making purchases ... or why not. - Page 12) "People wanted to do more than CRM. So we've popped the top off." - Page 2
3) "50 to 70 per cent of new features in a release come from its customers." - Page 3
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