Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced that EDGAR Online, Inc. (Nasdaq: EDGR), a leading provider of value-added global business and financial information, joins 1,200 financial services companies standardized on Salesforce for Financial Services to support its marketing, sales and service efforts.
Leveraging the power and flexibility of the salesforce.com on-demand model, EDGAR Online has automated its Web-to-lead and lead distribution processes, and integrated Salesforce with existing back office applications. As a result, the company has reaped the benefits of enterprise-wide access to customer information, a clear view into its pipeline, and shortened sales cycles.
EDGAR Online is one of the 32,300 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of April 30, 2007. Revenue and subscribers will be recognized as the service is delivered.
"As our company grew from a free content provider to a subscription and solutions company, we needed a way to collect leads, assign prospects and track our performance. After evaluating a number of solutions, we selected Salesforce," said Eric Evans, VP, Account Management and Sales Operations for the Corporate Sales Office at EDGAR Online. "As an online company ourselves, we recognized the tremendous advantages of salesforce.com's on-demand model. We have been rewarded in our choice with a cost-effective solution that met our needs initially and has allowed us to easily make changes as our business has grown."
EDGAR Online used Salesforce Connect to integrate online lead generation, accounts receivable and account provisioning processes with its Salesforce deployment. Online leads are automatically routed to EDGAR Online's corporate sales team and further delegated by internal assignment rules, such as named national account. The account management and sales team can use Salesforce to email prospects and then track responses, follow-up and expected outcomes. Closed won opportunities trigger back-office actions for creating subscriptions and invoicing customers.
Because Salesforce is fully integrated with other enterprise systems, EDGAR Online's sales, accounting, customer service teams and others throughout the organization have fast and easy access to customer information and account status. Salesforce is now the central repository for all account management, sales and customer service activities.
"In addition to giving us better access to information, Salesforce reporting provides a fast and easy way to gain insight into which efforts are providing the greatest return," added Evans. "We're using this information to guide cross-sell and up-sell activities to maximize overall results. Salesforce is the foundation upon which we have built our company growth strategy."