Sage smooth as ice

As the Stanley Cup finals between the Carolina Hurricanes and Edmonton Oilers moves along, Sage Software today dropped the puck on the ice, announcing that the National Hockey League’s Buffalo Sabres team has implemented Sage CRM to automate ticket sales, customer service and marketing activities. Sage CRM has been deployed for the employment of more than thirty Sabres employees in managing sales and marketing programs.

The Sabres claim a “significant” increase in ticket sales and a twenty percent reduction in customer service administration since implementing Sage CRM in 2004. The Sabres worked with Sage CRM Solutions business partner Cliant LLC to implement Sage CRM. The Sage CRM system generates target-marketing lists to support outbound telemarketing campaigns and creates cross-sell campaigns about club-level seating and special event tickets. Detailed Sage CRM reports promise to allow for any marketing campaign’s offer or call script to be adjusted immediately. “Before Cliant came in with Sage CRM, we had a combination of proprietary systems, custom database applications and third-party products throughout the organization,” continued Matheny.

“The lack of integration and functionality limited our ability to effectively grow and service our customer base.” Cliant developed Sage CRM customization to integrate the system with applications such as tickets.com. Data on each customer and transaction is merged into Sage CRM to form a sales history. Sage CRM reports help calculate demographics for each type of customer with opportunity reports showing the percentage of revenue each sales promotion generates, segmented by key demographics.

An challenge specific to hockey teams is to need to deal with mail presorting to save on U.S. and Canadian postage, to deal with two fan bases. Sage CRM is a CRM solution for integration of vital sales, marketing and customer support information for small- and mid-sized businesses. Sage CRM provides flexible deployment options and is available as an on-demand CRM solution at SageCRM.com, or as an on-premise CRM system. Sage CRM also includes a remote data synchronization client and support for wireless devices.

Sage Software is a provider to more than 2.6 million small- and mid-sized business customers in North America. Sage products support accounting, operations, customer relationship management, human resources, time tracking, merchant services and the specialized needs of accounting practices and the construction, distribution, manufacturing, nonprofit and real estate industries. Sage Software is a subsidiary of The Sage Group plc. Formed in 1981, Sage was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1989 and now has 5.0 million customers served by 10,500 employees worldwide.