Celeritas Group

Every CEO knows that improving a company’s sales pipeline is essential to growing revenue. Celeritas Group LLC, a Colorado-based, investment and management holding company, was determined to upgrade their sales cycle management and visiblity processes to help achieve growth – even in a tough economy. The company undertook a comprehensive search to find a CRM solution that would track leads more efficiently, manage their pipeline, and ultimately increase revenues.

In 2011 Celeritas Group implemented Soffront Software CRM, a product from a leading provider of CRM software. The system has now been in place for almost a year, and Celeritas Group is well on their way to achieving their implementation goals.

Improving the front end of the sales cycle

Prior to installing Soffront, each salesperson at Celeritas Group used individual methods (such as excel spreadsheets or a Rolodex) to track leads from tradeshows, email or advertising campaigns. Because every sales person maintained a separate prospect list, management had no visibility into the pre-sales cycle.

“Today, businesses can’t be successful just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. We must actively prospect, focusing on effective sales creation events,” explained Hal Harvey, president and CFO of Celeritas Group.

Using Soffront CRM, Celeritas Group now analyzes all of their marketing activities, such as trade shows, email blasts or web campaigns. “It’s great to be able to analyze history, but even better to be able to analyze the future,” continued Harvey. “Through this type of analysis, Soffront helps us determine the most effective means of reaching our revenue goals.”

Narrowing forty contenders down to one

Celeritas Group began their search for an effective CRM tool by developing a list of their top criteria, which included the following “must haves”: software as a service (Saas), ease of implementation, simple to use, data integration capabilities, dynamic workflow, robust features, right-sized solution, mobile application-enabled and finally return on investment (ROI).

Celeritas Group started with a list of the top forty vendors and gave each vendor a grade for each criterion. The four highest rated solutions were then scrutinized further through demos, user reviews, and cost-analysis. In the end, Soffront came out on top.

Ease of use, robust functionality – all at a reasonable cost per user

Soffront was installed at Celeritas Group in October of 2011. “Now we have a comprehensive database of all our leads. More importantly, we are able to see a complete picture of our sales pipeline at any given time,” said Chris Klemmetsen, Celeritas IT Manager. “This capability allows us to better track opportunities and forecast revenues. Soffront is well worth the money.”

Soffront’s CRM makes it easy for Celeritas Group to see the big picture because all the data is at their fingertips and on one page. “The ease of use design reduces the amount of time spent searching for information, removing tedious clicking and scrolling prevalent in many competing products we evaluated,” continued Klemmetsen. “Queries and reports are flexible and functional, allowing us to easily customize the software to meet our needs.”

Klemmetsen added, “Soffront’s customer support is fantastic. They are responsive, proficient, and knowledgeable. Our requests were understood and addressed immediately. Implementation was fast and easy.”

Visibility: helping us grow

For the past year Celeritas has used Soffront CRM to gain invaluable visibility into their sales pipeline. “Soffront CRM is an effective CRM tool with solid functionality that has helped us improve our sales performance cycle in a relatively short period of time,” Harvey concluded. “It’s a CRM tool that is helping us — improve sales cycle visibility, customer service, and new market development.”