For those of you who don’t know us, Maximizer has been delivering CRM solutions for over 29 years to customers all around the world. We’ve seen our product grow from a very basic client tracking solution, to the robust three tiered CRM that it is today. And while we’re always happy to talk about our rich heritage, I think it’s a good time to talk about Making the Switch to Maximizer CRM.
We thought the best way to illustrate why you should switch would be to tell you the story of an International Hotel chain that made this switch already. Theirs is an interesting story, and not an uncommon one.
Hotel chain based in Vancouver, with locations across Canada, and in places like New York, San Francisco and Seattle.
While it goes without saying that their primary goal is to have travelers stay with them, a huge part of their business is in attracting groups, conventions, and related people to using their facilities for their events.
Each hotel is staffed by their own sales groups, making their selling very siloed. As a result, they are very reliant upon the use of tools like CRM to understand organization wide how business is doing.
This hotel chain had had a CRM in place for a few years, that simply wasn’t delivering the results that they needed.
When I first started speaking with them, they told me that their users didn’t really know how to use the system they had in place. That the users didn’t know who to call for help when something didn’t work, or went wrong.
They complained about the lack of staff training, and that even with the CRM in place, that their sales team was still spending 2 hours every week generating manual sales reports in excel.
They also told me that they were extremely concerned about the amount of money they were spending annually because they were being billed in $USD, and that they knew that if they needed more functionality from a marketing and integration standpoint, that they were going to have to increase their annual subscription spend.
And they told me that when it came to doing any customization of their system, that they had to rely upon 3rd party solution providers to deliver those customizations. That they were 3rd party wasn’t the only problem though – the main problem was that the 3rd party was always booked up for months which delayed any work that needed doing.
What was interesting about all of this? All of the problems they described were not unique to their organization.
Typically we come across 6 reasons why people want to make the switch
They want to work with a company that is a single point of conversation
They want to pay a reasonable price.
They want flexible deployment options.
They want a product that is easy to adopt for their users
They want a product that simply integrates with their existing tools
They want a level of comfort in knowing that their data is both secure from outside threats, and not at risk of being lost.
So when we got started talking about Maximizer, we started by talking about our company, and how we approach each and every new prospect.
We start by learning more about your business. We want to better understand not only your pains, but what good would look like moving forward. We want to establish a level of trust with you that we won’t abandon you at any point, whether during the presales process or after you’ve purchased your subscription.
With the hotel chain, we went through a series of conversations about their organization, and actually had them do a demo for us of their existing system so that we could see first hand what their pains were. But we also learned what was working in their existing system for them. We felt that it just made sense to incorporate the good with the fixes we could deliver.
We delivered 2 separate live demonstrations of Maximizer for their various stakeholders, from the executive group right through to the sales team members, and provided a tailored trial of Maximizer so that they could test our solution to confirm that it would meet their needs.
Because of the level of service we offered before we collected dime 1, the customer was almost ready to commit.
That their existing system didn’t work for them didn’t change the fact that they had years of data sitting in it. Starting from scratch with Maximizer wasn’t an option – they needed to know that we could handle the migration of their data into our system.
It was at that time that we introduced them to our Professional Services team, and to Steve in particular. I’m going to hand the mike over to Steve, to talk about the migration process. Steve --
Steve –5 step migration process
The data conversion process can take as little as three business days, and includes five stages:
Data Mapping Workshop
Data Migration
Data Migration Review
Client Sign Off prior to Go Live
Go Live
Data migrated from Salesforce to Maximizer CRM includes:
Accounts, Contacts, Users
Attachments & Events
Leads, Notes, Tasks
2 – 3 minutes discussing how they were nervous but because we spent time with them before signing off that the data was migrated correctly and showing them were everything was located, and how to use maximizer, they were off to a running start
I think that the story we’ve told will give you a number of good reasons to consider a switch to Maximizer. But I know that it always comes down to the results.
Do you remember when I talked about the sales teams having to commit two hours every week to compiling excel reports that documented their sales and who they were talking to?
We made sure that problem went away. We were able to give each sales person a day back in their month – 2 hours a week, times 4 weeks – 8 hours. Multply that by 13 users – that means a total of 104 hours every month.
Do you remember when I said that they were concerned about their annual spend? By coming to Maximizer, they were able to save $150 per user based on the licenses that they currently had in place. But don’t forget, they also said that they needed additional functionality, which meant that they were going to have to go to the next level in their current system’s licensing schema, so in reality by choosing Maximizer they ended up saving thousands of dollars.
And finally, do you remember when I said that there was a lack of cohesion in their existing deployment? We made sure that everyone knew how to use Maximizer, from the sales team up to the Executive team. We made sure that they had a series of dashboards that documented everything that both their Sales and Executive teams needed to know. As a result, everyone in the organization was very satisfied in knowing that they had a reliable system that was delivering immediate and cohesive results. They were finally a complete team.