Thanks to its new CRM solution, an integration of Salesforce and Outlook, this Chicago-based non-profit can now tune in to its clients’ needs clearer and faster, no matter where in the world its millions of listeners reside.
The business of Moody Radio is in one sense absolutely timeless: Its mission is to spread Christian teachings that guide its millions of listeners around the world. Yet in another sense, the business of Moody Radio is very much dependent on the moment we live in now: its success depends on the flexibility and efficiency with which it manages a fast-paced global network of customers.
After more than a decade of successful growth, Moody Radio found that its home-grown CRM solution no longer met the needs of its business. Built before the advent of the Web, “pasted together by a friend” of the company, recalls Moody’s manager of Network Development, Scott Krus, “it was incredible for its time, but it had outlived its usefulness by at least five years.”
Moody needed a solution that would enable its sales force – which markets a broad range of programming to its 1,100 affiliate stations – to better keep track of which shows both single stations and families of stations were subscribing to, or cancelling, through a wide range of customer categories. Customers were signing three different kinds of contracts on paper, and dropping them in the mail. Sales reps wanted to be able to run a report on an affiliate’s contract, to know when an agreement on a program subscription was coming up for renewal. But there was no integration.
After canvassing the market, Moody’s marketing team decided that Salesforce CRM would be the solution to take Moody where it needed to go. And it brought in Harvest Solutions to craft a solution specific to its business.
Customization: benefits for nonprofits, and for the broadcast industry
“The most challenging part for us was getting the data out of our old system and putting that into Salesforce. Harvest was very helpful in that,” Krus notes. “But it wasn’t just a matter of populating one old field into a new one. We sat down as a team with Harvest and scrutinized each module.” Because Moody’s business practices are evolving, its new Salesforce solution had to accommodate its latest innovations – such as a new barter option through which a station can carry programming in exchange for running a sixty-second Moody announcement.
“This was a very different experience. I had never worked with a solution as customizable as Salesforce,” Krus says. “We knew from the beginning we weren’t boxed in.”
The Salesforce solution provides Moody a key benefit for a non-profit business -- its fundraisers at the Moody Bible Institute, the network’s parent company, are now using Salesforce to see the programming interests of its potential donors. “Now we can go in and pull all the affiliates who carry one or more programs and tell the stewardship rep (fundraiser) that those are all good potential contacts.” A non-profit version of Salesforce CRM is available to further support some of the unique business processes such as tracking donations, grants, household affiliations, and in-kind donations.
Not only fundraisers are benefitting, however. Thanks to an integration of Salesforce with Microsoft Outlook, the Moody Radio team now has access to new fields of customer information from Salesforce right in their Outlook contacts. “If we are going into a station we haven’t spoken to in a long time, we can now check the station information in Salesforce via email,” Krus explains. And since contact information is constantly changing at any customer, now anyone on Moody’s team who visits an affiliate station and gets new information about that customer can make changes in Salesforce via Outlook, so that all Moody reps will see the correct information from then on. “Today we depend so much on email addresses, and if you send out mass emails as we do and thirty or forty come bouncing back, you don’t always have the chance to track them down”, Krus says. “Now any organization can send us a contact update and we all have the most current and accurate information.”
What may truly distinguish Moody’s new CRM solution, however, is its adaption to its rather unique industry. “Broadcasting is different from any other business function – they have to deal with outside producers, time slots, a different business process,” notes Jim Campbell, the Senior CRM Consultant for Harvest Solutions who worked with Moody Radio. “When I was younger, I had a choice of careers, broadcasting or IT, and I chose IT.” But Campbell has kept his eyes on the path not taken and this CRM engagement benefitted directly from Campbell's knowledge of the industry. Moody and Campbell created options for sales process classifications unique to broadcasting, such as producer, producer-cost, and producer mark-up, that Moody Radio’s legacy system had not offered.
Flexibility for the future
“What Salesforce enabled us to do was put Moody on an industry-standard platform that not only addresses today’s requirements, but lets them feel comfortable that upcoming and future requirements will also be addressed – they’re not locked in,” explains Jay Rivard, Practice Director for Harvest Solutions. If, for example, Moody decides down the road that it would like its Salesforce solution to capture real-time order histories, it will be able to connect to the company’s financial system.
“It’s been a great move for us, this ability to customize, since radio is changing very quickly,” Krus explains. “Our relationship agreements are changing; for example: five years ago we could never have anticipated that our office would be promoting an iPhone application.” Thanks to its newly customized CRM solution, Moody’s network marketing team is ready to ride the airwaves into the future.
