In a great example of how we at QlikTech apply the use of QlikView to our jobs every day, I wanted to share this story, which may affect those of you who have sales apps. Our director of inside sales Troy Anderson put in place a targeted set of sales campaigns and our marketing operations team set up those campaigns in Salesforce.com. In “the olden days,” each sales rep on Troy’s team would then have to figure out on their own how to whittle down the list of contacts within each account to determine the best person to call on for a particular outbound or “sales led” campaign.

Further complicating matters, some accounts ― and individuals within those accounts ― were good fits for multiple campaigns, which increased the complexity of effort for the sales reps. Additionally, Salesforce.com doesn’t provide a mechanism to help the sales reps visualize and track the progress they are making against a campaign.

So one of the sales executives on the team, Jeremy Boesche, created a QlikView app that pulled company and contact details from Salesforce and enabled the sales reps to update contact or account status in Salesforce without having to navigate the campaign function in the Salesforce system. It took Jeremy 2-3 hours to create the initial app, and then an inside sales consultant on the team, Josh Good, spent about a day refining it (creating additional visualizations, improving the look and feel, etc.). This QlikView app enabled the team to aggregate the contacts in an account and discover who the key person was at an account to call on for a particular campaign.

As Troy Anderson describes, as a result of using this app his sales team got a “higher return on energy.” He said, “The reps no longer have to waste time wondering, ‘Where should I focus? Which customer should I call next?’ Now, they use a QlikView app to make an informed decision on who to call." Troy estimates that each sales rep saves at least an hour a day by using the app and spends roughly half the time against a campaign compared to the usual. “As a result of using QlikView,” Troy said, “This has been one of the most successful outbound marketing campaigns we have ever done.”