Siebel Systems, Inc.

Siebel Systems, Inc., of San Mateo, California is a leading provider of comprehensive sales and marketing information systems. Siebel wanted to enable team selling by providing account teams with instant access to the information they require to close business deals and serve customers. The Siebel product, called Siebel Sales Enterprise, is a set of integrated sales information modules has produced results such as an increase in sales by enabling teams of sales professionals to share information about accounts, contacts, product interest, and historical activity.

Business Advantage

• International versions of SQL Anywhere and SQL Server 11 allow Siebel Sales Enterprise to facillitate transactions in multiple currencies and enable sales managers to automatically convert forecasts from various international offices into a common currency.

Key Benefits

• Produces revenue increases of 10 to 30 percent
• Increases profitability up to 60 percent for leading companies worldwide 

Sybase Technology

• SQL Anywhere

Industry

• Software

Integrating Sales Information for Sales Professionals
Not long ago, the sales professional's toolkit included a firm handshake, a smile, and a Dale Carnegie course. Information about prospects and customers was scribbled on napkins or in Day-Timers. Automation consisted of a few mainframe reports and, perhaps, e-mail and contact management software.

Such haphazard methods made customer information difficult to obtain and share. And it often disappeared entirely when a salesperson left the company. Instead of selling, sales representatives spent most of their time figuring out who to call and pulling together customer and product information to prepare for their calls.

Siebel Systems, Inc., of San Mateo, California, set out to change all that by doing for sales and marketing what business process re-engineering has done for manufacturing and accounting. Founded in 1993, Siebel Systems is a leading provider of comprehensive sales and marketing information systems. It has designed its systems to improve the effectiveness of sales and marketing by providing comprehensive, up-to-date information about customers, products, and competitors. SQL Anywhere and SQL Server 11 technologies are an integral part of the Siebel solution.

A Comprehensive Sales Information System
The Siebel product, called Siebel Sales Enterprise, is a set of integrated sales information modules that help sales professionals:

• Increase sales by enabling teams of sales professionals to share information about accounts, contacts, product interest, and historical activity
• Improve product knowledge with an on-line repository of sales-related information, such as competitive information and on-line literature
• Shorten sales cycles by enabling sales professionals to develop, verify, submit, and revise quotes tailored to customer requirements
• Setter manage business by allowing sales representatives and managers to view information in a graphical format
• Leverage multiple sales channels with telebusiness capabilities that help telesales and telemarketing professionals generate and qualify leads
• Empower mobile salesprofessionals with remote computing facilities that exchange and synchronize information between mobile users and the server database

In short, Siebel Sales Enterprise gives the entire account team instant access to all the information they need to close business deals. So they can serve customers better and spend more time with them. It enables "team selling" where all salespeople, support staff, engineers, and telemarketers assigned to an account have access to complete information about all interactions with the customer from the initial lead, through the sales process, order fulfillment, and beyond to customer support and service contacts. Sales management also receives the information it needs to measure the effectiveness of marketing, advertising, and sales campaigns.

"The Siebel Sales Enterprise allows large, multichannel, global organizations to manage all interactions with customers so that telemarketing, telesales, and field sales, as well as sales management and corporate marketing, can all share the same information," explains Pat House, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Siebel Systems, Inc.

Determining Customer Requirements
When developing its product suite, Siebel interviewed dozens of large companies to identify common technical requirements. It came up with five: the system had to be scalable (support sales forces of 50 to thousands of salespeople, including mobile users and telebusiness professionals at headquarters), global (transact business in multiple currencies and languages), configurable (adaptable to each customer's unique requirements), easy to use and fast, and functionally complete.

Sybase iAnywhere Helps Meet Technical Needs
Siebel addressed these requirements by developing an N-tiered, object-oriented architecture that separates the information presentation, application logic, database functionality, and interprocess communications into different tiers. This approach allows Siebel to deploy multiple configurations that address the varying needs of large companies. Siebel's application supports mobile sales representatives using laptops in the field, as well as telesales, telemarketing, and other employees who are permanently connected to a client/server database. It extends the enterprise that connects sales representatives, partners, and customers over the Internet. iAnywhere Solutions plays a key role throughout the Siebel architecture.

Siebel uses SQL Anywhere as its database for its mobile computing application. SQL Anywhere lets Siebel Sales Enterprise support field sales representatives who use laptop computers and require intermittent access to the corporate server.
"We chose SQL Anywhere after a thorough evaluation of all the possible PC databases," says House. "It was the only product that was fully SQL compliant, that could handle large amounts of data, and that could provide immediate information access for mobile users. SQL Anywhere is the fastest, most reliable, and lightweight database in its class."

Siebel uses SQL Server 11 to provide high-performance data management for the integrated modules. Siebel worked closely with iAnywhere Solutions engineering and tuning organizations to take advantage of SQL Server 11 performance enhancements to ensure that Siebel Sales Enterprise would furnish top-notch performance and scalability. "The Siebel Sales Enterprise takes advantage of such SQL Server 11 features as the cost-based optimizer, dirty read support, and the ability to directly interact with native connections to Client-Library. As a result, it provides scalable, split-second support to global companies that have thousands of users and multigigabyte databases," says David Schmaier, Siebel's vice president of product marketing.

International versions of SQL Anywhere and SQL Server 11 allow Siebel Sales Enterprise to support double-byte character sets and are ideal for international operations. Companies can generate transactions in multiple currencies and enable sales managers to automatically convert forecasts from various international offices into a common currency.

The robustness of SQL Server 11 helps Siebel provide functionally complete solutions that can track thousands of products, contacts, or opportunities. SQL Anywhere and Siebel Sales Enterprise give mobile professionals all the data they need on their laptop, including product literature, and new leads, plus the ability to manage existing accounts and share customer information with other members of the sales team.

Overall, Siebel is quite pleased with the contributions iAnywhere Solutions technology has made to its products. "Performance, scalability, and portability are key requirements for large organizations. Siebel uses iAnywhere Solutions' products to address these critical issues," says House.

Improved Sales and Profitability
Siebel products began shipping since 1995, and have already achieved widespread market acceptance. Siebel contracted for more than 36,000 seats in 1995 and expects to deliver another 150,000 seats this year. Customers include Nationwide Insurance, The Dow Chemical Company, Cisco Systems, The Dial Corp, Andersen Consulting, Digital Equipment Corporation, Frank Russell Securities, The Quaker Oats Company, and American President Lines.

These companies are adopting Siebel's technology in response to substantial evidence that sales force automation can significantly impact the bottom line. Customer studies show that companies that have successfully automated sales and marketing functions have seen revenue increases of anywhere from 10 percent to more than 30 percent. For example, says Rocky Pimentel, senior vice president and chief financial officer of LSI Logic, "Siebel will increase LSI Logic's revenues by at least 10 to 15 percent."

According to another satisfied customer, "Using Siebel Sales Enterprise, Viking's Field Sales professionals have documented significant productivity gains by increasing the time they spend in front of their customers by as much as 25 percent. This increase exceeds our original expectations," says Ed Hoy, project manager of Viking Freight, Inc.

Even more impressive is the potential impact on profitability. As little as a 15 percent increase in revenue can result in a 60 percent increase in profitability. With such results, sales and marketing systems will soon be essential to compete in the global marketplace.