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Tarantella Grows Global Sales Utilizing Sage SalesLogix

When Frank Wilde took the helm as Tarantella’s new president, he realized that Tarantella needed a CRM tool. He was familiar with Sage SalesLogix, having used it successfully in three previous companies. After consulting with a Sage Software business partner, an irresistible selling point emerged. Sage SalesLogix could be provided as a joint solution with Tarantella’s own flagship product, Secure Global Desktop Enterprise Edition, a secure application access solution, offering CRM efficiencies to Tarantella’s 12,000 customers worldwide.

Within two days of the Sage SalesLogix proposal, Tarantella had placed an order. Sales staff began using the system immediately after customizations were completed. The support team was using Sage SalesLogix shortly thereafter. “I’ve been through many software system acquisitions before at various companies,” says Lorie Goudie, director of customer support. “It usually takes from one to five years from proposal to implementation. To have a new CRM system operational in a few months was fantastic.”

Powerful Data Storage

Tarantella uses Sage SalesLogix to capture sales leads obtained from trial downloads of its own software application, marketing programs, strategic partners, and trade shows. A customized Web service seamlessly moves data into Sage SalesLogix. Leads are tagged by source and stored in Sage SalesLogix. The application then distributes leads to resellers, master resellers and direct sales team members, and tracks all subsequent interactions throughout the customer lifecycle.

“Before, we had eight separate databases,” explains Goudie. “Sage SalesLogix has replaced three of these so far, providing us with active links to a single data repository. The main benefit is that we have accurate, consolidated, and up-to-date information on all of our customers, including data from partner sales that used to be invisible to us due to a two-tier channel system. We can also do a much better job tracking and managing renewals for Tarantella software products, a significant factor in improving our profitability.”

All of Tarantella’s sales representatives, regardless of tier or geographic location, have access to Sage SalesLogix through Secure Global Desktop Enterprise Edition (SGDEE), one of Tarantella’s products. “We install SGDEE on the server, which allows anyone to connect with Sage SalesLogix, anytime, anywhere they are working,” explains Goudie.

Instant Sales Notification

A further benefit of Sage SalesLogix, Goudie says, is being able to combine product demo downloads and sales activities with customer service functions, making holistic account information easily available to the teams that need it. “The moment that a sale occurs, the service team knows about it, whether they’re in the U.S., U.K., or India,” she says. “It’s easy to assign and route tickets to different locations, and have e-mail go directly into a ticket history location. This is so much more efficient than the cutting and pasting
we had to do before.”

Superior Customer Service

Tarantella has found that Sage SalesLogix customer service functions improved their support response workflow. “We benefit daily from Sage SalesLogix and its SpeedSearch capabilities, which help our representatives quickly access common customer resolutions and support data,” Goudie notes. “Sage SalesLogix provides us with excellent reporting and grouping capabilities as well, to enhance the quality of our customer service. Our hope is to add a Web customer portal as we continue to expand our Sage SalesLogix
implementation. We anticipate that automated data entry through Sage SalesLogix will be 20 percent faster than our previous manual systems, and that automated letter preparation on the system will trim another 20 percent off the time required to create and ship mailings.”