Premier IT Case Study

Premier IT provides innovative, high-quality workforce performance improvement solutions and services. They help clients gain competitive advantage by increasing the know-how of their workforce, improving their methods of developing and managing skills and helping them to improve their return on investment in IT. Premier IT is a Microsoft Gold Partner and specialises in training, support and website design.

Company name: Premier IT
Company site: http://www.premierit.com
Product: Sage CRM
Date: 09/04/10
Region: London
No Of Seats: 20

Situation:

“We used to have ACT!,” explains Carl Corrigan Marketing Manager of Premier IT, a London based training IT support and web development company. “Then after that we had a program called Sugar which, didn’t really meet our specification.”

What he did know, however, was that the demands of this large company required a database solution that was adaptable and flexible enough to run across four business units. Something that would help the company to easily keep track of contacts and customers, improve cold calling, account management, “and pretty much everything else,” as Carl adds. Internet helps search for solution.

Carl admits that his CRM knowledge at the time was about a year and a half out of date. “From what I had learned at a previous company where I had implemented similar change, I knew who the big names were. But I also knew I had to get into some research to see how things had changed in the interim.”

To conduct that research, Carl wasted no time by using the internet as his tool. “I visited all the relevant websites, and a few that weren’t, and really got up to speed with what was now available and what it could do. I also used a fair few of the demos that are offered to get a real feel for what we might want.”

Solution:

The decision was taken to go with Sage CRM on the basis of its power and flexibility. Now all Carl needed to do was find a suitable reseller. “We contacted DMC,” Carl explains, “and they arranged for us to use a hosted trial version for a few weeks. We also had in depth discussions about the technical side - it was very important that the final solution could be hosted by us totally in house.

"DMC were extremely helpful in this regard from both a user and technical point of view, explaining clearly what the application could deliver to us. Then they helped us run all the necessary internal checks to make sure we could physically run Sage CRM easily and robustly.”

Up until this point, all contact had been via phone and email. Now Carl needed a face to face presentation. He also needed to talk about prices. “In fact we had three resellers come in to present to us finally,” he says. “So why did I choose to go with DMC? Well it wasn’t because they were the cheapest, because they weren’t. There is always more to a decision than that.

"Where DMC impressed me was with the way they had clearly done their homework and researched my business thoroughly before talking to me. That for me is what distinguishes a potential supplier - the fact that they treat each prospect as an individual and don’t try and sell you any old, one size fits all, solution.” Premier IT, DMC and Sage - the perfect mix.

Benefits:

The software was installed in September 2006; it took no more than a couple of days. “Nice and quick,” Carl agrees. After that Carl took a cautious approach to rolling out the application across the enterprise. “I’ve done this sort of thing before at other companies and I’m a great believer in limited pilots. "In this case it was for six weeks, with every two weeks the program rolled out to another key user and a department.

This gave me day-to-day feedback while behind the scenes we began to remove the old system, taking data out and working out what we really wanted to carry over and what could happily be dumped. My feeling is that it is best to have a small high quality database than a big one full of essentially useless data.”

“As the feedback came in I could see how each user and each department would require customisation and that I did myself. When we were happy with that we added one sales team a month. It was a phased roll out for the simple reason that when sales people are talking to me about changes and so on they aren't selling. In a phased roll out you only have one team at a time needing to talk to me about the system.” Since then everything has been fine and the system doing its job of driving business further forward and delivering real financial and operational gains to the company through vastly improved efficiency.

Have there been any technical issues that required DMC’s help? “Well they came back and offered us useful training, administrator training and also some end user training,” he says. “Any support issues have been exclusively phone based. We have only had few minor bugs and DMC squashed them very quickly.”