Tech Talk: Network Manager Caters to Clients with CRM

By Elizabeth Wasserman

A San Francisco network management firm gets more client referrals after instituting an online customer relationship management (CRM) system.

PacketTrap Networks, of San Francisco, was founded in 2006 as a network troubleshooting and resolution company. The fast-growing business, which expects to double the size of its 23-person workforce in the next year, found that upgrading to a better customer relationship management (CRM) platform helped save time, labor, and better serve clients, CEO Steve Goodman tells IncTechnology.com.

Elizabeth Wasserman: Why has CRM been essential to your business?

Steve Goodman: As an early stage company, customer relationships are incredibly important, both from a referral and from a product roadmap standpoint. Customer referrals are important to us so the most important thing we can do is deliver high quality products to them. We do that by talking to our customers on the early end about product requirements, through the sales process, for customer support and we strive to evolve the relationships with those customers for years to come. From that perspective, having a CRM application is imperative and we would sink without it.

Wasserman: Did you use CRM from the start?

Goodman: Initially, we were in development for nine months. Subsequent to that, we went with a low-end CRM product. But it didn't scale very well and we couldn't use it for remote workers. It was also not relational, which means that you couldn't put thousands of records in it. It was really meant for a small office. We had quickly grown to more than 30,000 users and recognized that we needed to bring in something more stable and robust..

Wasserman: What type of product did you choose?

Goodman: We went with Salesforce.com. We realized we needed something to scale with us and we didn't want to pay an arm and a leg to get it. If I add a new sales guy, I just add an affordable, new monthly fee. I love the ability to not pay everything up front but on a monthly basis. It's almost like a per-drink model or pay-as-you-go. If you get the whole package up front, it gives you a certain number of uses. Well, we don't have that number of users today. I'd rather pay as we ramp up. These types of software-as-a-service models allow us to do that.

Wasserman: How long did it take to migrate your business over?

Goodman: That's actually the beauty of it. They have a very open back end architecture that allows a relatively inexperienced developer or engineer to easily migrate from your legacy systems over to them. Then there is the flexibility of their systems to customize them to your needs. That's really important. The transition was no more than a few days. We could do it over a weekend, which was nice. We didn't lose any productivity as a result. There is training involved and that took some time.

Wasserman: What can you do now that you couldn't do before?

Goodman:, Let’s say someone downloaded our software to take advantage of our  21 day trial. If a sales person wanted to extend the trial because the potential customer didn't have the opportunity to use it or test it, it used to be they would actually have had to close down the proprietary legacy system and go into a completely separate system and log in and find that customer. The whole process would have taken two or three minutes. We've all been on customer service calls waiting for that customer service rep to do their job. Now, the whole thing is integrated so with the click of a button I can extend their trial.

The customer experience is exponentially better. For an early stage company in a highly competitive market, we can differentiate ourselves with the customer experience we provide. Software differentiation is becoming less and less a differentiating factor, especially in a market like we're in. The more that a customer feels glued to you, the more likely that customer is to recommend you to another customer. And 50 percent of our business is word of mouth.