Efficient collaboration of a distributed sales team and clients helps speed-up the business growth

Interview with Bob Hirsh, MarineMotion.com

Bob, could you describe your business and tell what the primary need of your company was when you chose Wrike?

Our service is designed for boat and yacht brokers and dealers. We provide a multi-media portal that allows them to present their product, using video- and audio-capable slideshows. It serves as an interactive lead-gathering and marketing engine. MarineMotion is a fast-growing business. We have customers in different parts of the world. Right now, we are working on 20 plus projects run by distributed teams. To increase sales and to keep our customers satisfied, we need to carefully sort plenty of information. This would be impossible if we still tried to manage the business by collecting all the data into several spreadsheets and emailing them around. The introduction of Wrike was an enormous leap forward for us. We are now tracking the work of different departments in Wrike. The most important fact, however, is that the system helps us track our sales leads, control customer interactions and develop projects together with our customers.

You mentioned that you manage the work of different departments in Wrike. Could you tell us about it in detail?

We started to use Wrike, when we were putting together our sales team. We are hiring independent representatives from all over the United States, Australia, South Africa and other countries. We created a special folder in Wrike called "Human Resources" to track our recruitment. There we collect all the HR-relevant information, including job-ads, resumes, employment agreements and other candidate data. The folder is shared with me and the head of the sales department. Now it has about 10 or 13 subfolders, one for each member of the team.

Then we started running the sales lead-management and action-tracking system through Wrike. We have folders for regional sales leads for example, San Francisco leads that we want our representatives to follow up on. We often get a list with hundreds of potential contacts, each of which is converted into a separate task. We do it with the help of Wrike's powerful email integration feature. We enter the leads into an Excel spreadsheet. Then we do a mail merge from an email address registered in Wrike and send the data to wrike at wrike.com. We include a new folder name in brackets. All the leads show up in Wrike as tasks. The sales manager goes through these leads and assigns them to the sales representatives. The project management software lets me and my sales manager oversee and support our sales team's work through the system. We think it's a neat way to gather and connect people.

Could you describe how Wrike helps you to collect and manage all the relevant information on sales-lead development?

Of course! Each lead is represented as a task. Often these tasks have attachments, like RFPs. After our sales person makes a phone call, he sets the follow-up date and updates the task description. Any time the representatives log into the system, they can see what's due for the day. The dashboard helps them remember, who they need to contact today. So it is a like a lightweight CRM that is tightly integrated with all other processes that we run in Wrike.

The best part is that I get the daily digest of all progress made by my company. I know what my whole team has been doing from sales to human resource management. The introduction of the time-tracking feature in Wrike enabled us to keep track of our employees' time and effectiveness. It helped us implement accountability in our team. Now it is very easy to find out what each member of the team is responsible for and evaluate his results. Here, at MarineMotion, we realize that it will be extremely challenging to manage our distributed teams successfully by email and spreadsheets. We couldn't ask for a more efficient way to organize the business, than Wrike.

How does Wrike help you to collaborate with your clients?

If a lead turns into a project, we create a new folder in Wrike. That folder becomes a collaborative workspace. For example, if one of our representatives gets a chance to develop a Web-site for a marina, we create a folder for this project. This new folder is shared with the client, the site-production developers and the sales representative. Now the folder is a place for them to share ideas, discuss the project, plan it and keep track of the progress. Wrike regularly sends project updates, so our clients are notified of the progress. They can also follow up in real time so the feedback cycle is very short, which makes projects get completed faster. Wrike is the best project management software we have ever used.

Could you describe the benefits gained by MarineMotion with the introduction of Wrike?

Now I can better manage my distributed team, increase revenues, complete projects faster and build better communications with clients. As Wrike spans through all our departments, it is easy for me to get a complete picture and guide the business. Wrike is very agile and incredibly powerful project management software. Once you get the hang of it, it is simple and easy to use. Wrike saves us time and money, and helps to make the right decisions on time.