Working in the Cloud: Dr Pepper

Faced with a mass of home grown Excel-based sales contact systems, Dr Pepper Snapple Group – one of the US largest beverage firms -  achieved a 56% annual ROI with a calculated pay back of 2.3 years through use of Salesforce.com.

The firm used Sales Cloud 2 to improve its sales management, sales productivity and strategic decision making. The ROI was documented by industry analyst firm Nucleus Research in a study sponsored by Salesforce.com. Nucleus quantified the initial and ongoing costs of software, consulting, personnel, training, and other related costs over a three-year period to quantify the total cost of Dr Pepper Snapple Group's investment in Salesforce.com.

The firm was using a legacy CRM application but found that this was no longer being supported by the vendor. Within Dr Pepper, divisions had built complex spreadsheets to track and forecast more than 50 beverage brands that had to be consolidated monthly so managers could have a view of sales activity and pipeline forecasts. Having to enter data manually detracted from the field’s selling efforts and resulted in a five to six week gap in data output.

To replace this, the firm considered a number of solutions, including SAP, but after a pilot phase chose Salesforce.com on the basis of its reporting tools, seamless upgrade path, and cost-effective pricing.

Over a four week period, Dr Pepper deployed Sales Cloud 2 with a view to streamlining data entry, sales forecasting and reporting operations, enabling both greater visibility and greater productivity. "With the customizations we've been able to make, we've optimized our visibility so we can better measure our volume gain. The insight is incredibly valuable,” said Tina Koppe, administrator, Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

The firm now finds that managers save a day a week because sales information is available at their fingertips when they need to make decisions. Sales productivity has gone up as individual sales people can now keep all their sales information in one place which in turn reduces the amount of time required for them to submit their sales forecasts each month.

In addition, real time access to information is enabling managers to make faster budgeting and forecasting decisions and allowing them to focus on leveraging  data to identify new sales opportunities. Sales people and managers can rapidly access real-time information about sales performance by account, sector, and product, and rapidly identify opportunities for improvement.

"Dr Pepper Snapple Group's experience is evidence of the potential for Cloud Computing to better run businesses," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president, research, Nucleus Research. "The insight that companies like Dr Pepper Snapple Group can gain for decision making can have a large impact."