California Apparel News

Running a sales team can be complicated business, but a lot of salespeople still work with pen and paper rather than employ tech-savvy programs such as customer-relations management, according to Cirrus Path Inc., headquartered in Laguna Hills, Calif., which recently released its Cirrus Files cloud-based customer-relations management application.

One of the company’s top releases, the Cirrus Insight app, integrates data from San Francisco–based Salesforce.com with Gmail and Google apps and offers a free analytics package for analyzing and reporting that information.

Many retailers and sales groups believe CRM will make their companies more productive. Companies such as Oracle and Microsoft produce some of the best-known CRM programs. Over the past 15 years, companies began using CRM programs to compile granular information on consumers. In exchange for that data, consumers got goodies such as frequent-flyer miles, bonus credit-card points and loyalty cards. The sharing of information through CRM will bring better leads, improve closing rates and give everyone in a company, from marketing to sales, a more in-depth view of consumers and sales targets, according to the Salesforce website.

CRM may sound like a chief information officer’s dream come true, but getting everyone on staff to use the program can be hard, said Jason Hubbard, Cirrus Path’s vice president of marketing.

“How do you get your employees to use it?” he said. “We solve this by bringing Salesforce into the inbox of where salespeople live and where most customer interactions occur. Instead of trying to force your sales team to stop what they’re doing, go into Salesforce, look up or create a record, then come back and remember what they were working on—we make it a seamless platform.”

Cirrus Files also allows users to continually update and store new information.

“Cirrus Files lets you store your files in Google Drive but organizes them off of the structure of Salesforce. So every time a new account, opportunity, case, etc., is created in Salesforce, a corresponding folder is created in the drive,” Hubbard said. “Anything placed in that folder will show up on the page layout in Salesforce. So you always know exactly where to go to find your files,” he said.