Company: Network Appliance
Contact: Diana Ying, program manager
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
Industry: High-Tech, B2B
Annual revenue: $2,070,000,000
Number of employees: 5300

Quick read:

The customer development group at a large, publicly held high-tech company needed a central repository of data to help identify satisfied customers willing to be references when sales associates approached new prospects. Typically, finding such a customer could take as many as three days—a waste of valuable time that could jeopardize the sales lead.

By putting together a customer reference management database filled with relevant data on customers, the company was able to cut the amount of search time from days to seconds. The company's database now holds thousands of global references, complete with customer contacts, deployment details, and more than 1,200 customer-ready tools that the sales team can use.

The new information, along with the timely way it can be accessed, has more than tripled the number of customer references at the sales force's disposal. Moreover, information is highly secure, with role-based entitlements built in to manage access of the most sensitive types of data.

The Challenge:

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