Selligent and INA, viewing the future together
INA, France’s Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, is a public organisation with an industrial and commercial role that was founded in 1974 when ORTF, the state-run radio and television corporation, was dismantled. INA compiles, stores, restores and provides access to France’s audiovisual heritage, and runs research, production and training operations to keep a finger on the audiovisual sector’s pulse. It recently entrusted Selligent with the task of streamlining its product offering and managing its customer relationships.
jean-luc vernhetSales and Marketing Director
“We were happy to tweak some of our codes and terminology, but there was no way we were going to change our sales policies or rate schedule just because a provider’s software couldn’t handle them. When we talked to Selligent, we knew they could do exactly what we wanted them to do, without starting from scratch.”
“We also needed our CRM solution to blend into the in-house workflow application we use to track orders from proposal to billing”
“Our salespeople are more multitasking and more productive now. The information is more reliable, production cycles are shorter, and customer service is better”
Ina’s shelves hold about 1,000,000 hours of France’s national and regional television and radio heritage, and its treasure chest is swelling fast (it added 38,000 hours of television programmes and 21,000 hours of radio broadcasts last year alone). Its staff catalogue each incoming programme, and later retrieve it for clients wanting to rebroadcast it or bundle relevant snippets into new shows. Ina’s records include some 4,000,000 reference cards – each of which includes several hundred fields.
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A three-pronged approach
If Ina, strictly speaking, is government-owned, it is nevertheless run as a business firm. That is what recently prompted Jean-Luc Vernhet, its sales and marketing director, to put his department through a full overhaul. Doing so involved looking at CRM and at how it could help Ina build on its three main pillars: its clients, its products, and the time it takes to get one to the other. Closer to clients Ina deals with about 500 customers a year. Many of them, however, are researchers who work for a number of producers, broadcasters, publishers, distributors and other end users. The first step towards building direct ties with clients involved opening offices in Paris. A sales-team and sales-method overhaul followed. At that time, Ina had no central customer database. So it needed to pool its scattered and sometimes redundant client information into a central tool, which all its staff in touch with clients could share. That tool also needed to be flexible enough to handle end users as well as researchers and producers. A limitless product range Ina’s products include complete audiovisual programmes as well as excerpts which end users can repackage into new programmes. Those extracts can be as long or as short as clients want them to be, meaning the same programme can spawn a virtually endless number of excerpts – and meaning Ina is producing new sample products all the time. Its rate schedule, it is therefore easy to infer, is extremely complex; how much an excerpt costs hinges on its length, on whether it will be broadcast free-to-air or over cable, where and how many times it will be broadcast, the type of programme, and other factors. So Ina, it follows, needed a powerful, flexible and comprehensive tool that could encompass every one of these factors. Speeding up service Finished excerpts need to reach clients fast. But the process involves a number of steps – starting when a client talks to a salesperson and research begins and ending when Ina sends out the bill. Ina needs to clarify royalty issues and determine pricing. Staff researchers need to select relevant excerpts and send them to the salesperson. The salesperson needs to review them and forward them to the client. The end user needs to view or listen to them and select the most appropriate one. And Ina staff need to custom-prepare the final product. So everyone involved, needless to say, has to move fast and liase smoothly throughout the process. One part of Ina’s efforts to slash its time to market involved a large-scale file-digitising operation. The other involved setting up a CRM solution.
Flexibility, the sine-qua-non
It was the singularly complex nature of Ina’s operations that prompted it to choose Selligent in 2002. In Vernhet’s words, “We were happy to tweak some of our codes and terminology, but there was no way we were going to change our sales policies or rate schedule just because a provider’s software couldn’t handle them. When we talked to Selligent, we knew they could do exactly what we wanted them to do, without starting from scratch.” The fact that the solution could handle Ina’s particular business methods and accommodate all the associated requirements, in other words, tipped the balance in Selligent’s favour. Today, this database contains over 20,000 product references and 2,000 to 3,000 clients. Customising Selligent’s application around Ina’s rate schedule, however, involved considerable parameter-setting work. Product references are generated dynamically from an external database of items at order intake.
All-pervasive integration
Vernhet continues, “We also needed our CRM solution to blend into the in-house workflow application we use to track orders from proposal to billing.” Salespeople, as a result, can now also monitor their sales from beginning to end. Selligent furthermore interfaced its application with Ina’s ERP software. User project manager Valérie Thareau adds, “Beforehand, we (Ina project managers and process managers) decided to take a course on this tool at Selligent. It was a short course, but it helped us understand what competing integrators were talking about when they sent us their bids. That came in really handy later on.”
Trustworthy data and faster service
Work to set up the Selligent solution began in 2003, and the application became fully operational in January 2004. When asked about ROI, Vernhet said, “It’s too early to tell, but I can tell you this: we can trust the information now, and it’s easier to share and analyse that information, too. Our salespeople are also more multitasking now: they can deal with a client when the account manager is out of the office, for instance. And they’re clearly more productive: now that they can define their proposals with Selligent, and that Selligent is running with the application we use to monitor an order throughout its life cycle, they don’t have to type in the same bits of information more than once. So the information is more reliable, production cycles are shorter, and customer service is better.”
Handling the transition
Salespeople, in general, still eye CRM askance and, too often, see it as a senior-management ploy to police them. That is why they may tend to drag their feet about switching to more methodical procedures and new working rules. Vernhet, however, is optimistic: “Our salespeople have started seeing how this system can work for them; i.e. how they can use it to retrieve reliable reports and information, and to send out bills faster. They’ve definitely taken it on board; they’re even telling us what improvements they want next.”
Opening the door to evolution
Ina’s priority was to streamline everyday operations. However, over time, sales manager reporting has started to come together, and executives are talking about using Selligent in other departments and regional branches. Doing so, Ina expects, will provide a more comprehensive picture of its overall flow of files to customers. In future, clients will be able to track their orders, and Ina sales staff will run Selligent software on their PDAs, making them more mobile. The implementation of Selligent’s campaign management module is also in the pipeline.
