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Pivotal MarketFirst Achieves Significant Results at Sharp Electronics
LCD Product Group at Sharp Electronics increases number of qualified leads ten-fold and decreases the cost per lead by 85 percent using Pivotal MarketFirst
Vancouver, BC - June 5, 2003 - Pivotal Corporation (Nasdaq: PVTL; TSX: PVT), the leading provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software for mid-sized enterprises, today announced that Sharp Electronics has achieved significant, measurable results using Pivotal MarketFirst. In less than one year, the Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) Product Group within Sharp Electronics has increased the number of qualified leads ten-fold, decreased the cost per lead by 85 percent, and reduced advertising costs by 28 percent using Pivotal MarketFirst.
“At Sharp Electronics we are using Pivotal MarketFirst to further differentiate ourselves from other manufacturers in a highly competitive environment,” said Fred Krazeise, director of strategic marketing, Sharp LCD Product Group. “It gives us the ability to take the Sharp LCD product message direct to end users and create awareness, preference and demand for our products throughout our dealer network – an essential strategy to building long-term relationships. We began to see results within three weeks of using Pivotal MarketFirst. Now that I have it, I can’t live without it.”
Sharp Electronics LCD Product Group, based in New Jersey, began using Pivotal MarketFirst in June 2002, after a three week deployment. The product’s powerful yet intuitive campaign management capabilities enable Sharp to manage one-to-one, direct campaigns allowing the company to drive dynamic, personalized, and relevant information to prospects and customers. With the system’s ease-of-use and flexibility, marketers can quickly make changes to the system, such as adding surveys to outbound telemarketing campaigns.
In addition to giving Sharp powerful campaign management capabilities, Pivotal MarketFirst also enables the company to significantly improve its lead management processes and enhance support of its distribution network. In fact, by using Pivotal MarketFirst, the company has completely realigned the manner in which sales leads are captured, ranked and distributed to its resellers. In less than three weeks of using the solution, Sharp generated, qualified and distributed 96 percent of the entire previous year’s leads to its top dealers and resellers. They have also achieved a 100 percent follow-up on those leads, giving them an unprecedented lead conversion rate, which means more business for everyone involved, and better, faster service to end customers.
Pivotal MarketFirst has also helped Sharp reduce literature fulfillment expenses by 75 percent by giving the company the tools to quickly and electronically respond to customer requests for product collateral. Fulfillment requests can either be generated in the call center via agents, or by customers or prospects on the Web site. Once the request is submitted, Pivotal MarketFirst automatically fulfils the literature order and sends out a personalized email with the appropriate PDF, ensuring a consistent brand experience in process.
According to Anurag Khemka, vice president and general manager of marketing products, Pivotal, “The success that Sharp Electronics has achieved is a great example of how an innovative company with a commitment to customer excellence is using marketing automation to further differentiate itself in its industry. This latest success story further demonstrates the impact that Pivotal MarketFirst coupled with a smart marketing strategy can have on a company’s revenues, margins and customer loyalty.”
About Pivotal MarketFirst
Pivotal MarketFirst is a comprehensive marketing automation product designed for end-to-end management of multi-channel campaigns and marketing processes. It reduces both the cost and time to create smart, multi-wave, personalized campaigns and significantly increases the ability to deliver better leads to the right sales resources at the right time. Pivotal MarketFirst can be deployed either as a standalone solution, or as a product tightly integrated with the Pivotal 5 – the company’s newest CRM suite. Pivotal MarketFirst also enables companies to optionally outsource their marketing automation solution, reducing total-cost-of-ownership by eliminating the need to invest in communications and hardware infrastructure.
About Pivotal CorporationPivotal Corporation is the only CRM company that is 100 percent purpose-built to serve the demanding requirements of mid-sized enterprises – a powerful, highly flexible application platform, a complete set of CRM applications, and low-cost, results-producing implementation services. Pivotal delivers software and services that produce meaningful increases in revenues, margins and customer loyalty for companies and business units in the revenue range of $100 million to $3 billion. More than 1,500 companies around the world use Pivotal including: CIBC, Centex Homes, HarperCollins Publishers, Hitachi Telecom Inc., Premera Blue Cross, Royal Bank of Canada, Southern Company, and Vivendi.
Pivotal's complete CRM software suite includes a powerful application platform and capabilities in marketing, sales, service, contact centers, partner management and interactive selling. For more information, visit www.pivotal.com.
Forward Looking StatementsThis press release contains forward-looking statements that involve a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results of events to differ materially from those anticipated in our forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors, such as the need to develop, integrate and deploy applications to meet our customer's requirements, the possibility of development or deployment difficulties or delays, the dependence on our customer's satisfaction with Pivotal’s CRM, and such other risks involved in developing software solutions and integrating them with third-party software and services. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in our forward-looking statements are reasonable, individual results may vary, and we cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements or other future events. Moreover, neither we nor anyone else assumes responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of forward-looking statements.
Contact
Press Contact:
Lynn Harrell
TEEC
Tel: +44 (0) 776186036
Email: lharrell@theenterprisecompanny.co.ukCopyright Information
© 2003 Pivotal Corporation. All rights reserved. Pivotal is a registered trademark of Pivotal Corporation. All other trade names mentioned are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners
