Alkemi International is a search engine marketing firm based in Melbourne, Australia. It was only the second search engine marketing company to establish in Australia. Alkemi takes a holistic approach with its clients that encompasses a variety of solutions, including traffic generation, pay-per-click management and search engine optimization.

Challenges

Over 10 years of operation and experience has shown Alkemi that it’s not just about investing in the right online strategies, but also knowing how to implement them to get solid business outcomes.

“Everything we do is rigorously designed to deliver the right visitors to a Web site,” said Nathan Stewart, CEO of Alkemi. “Also to ensure that those visitors do what the owners want them to when they arrive. It goes even further than that; it’s not just what we do, it’s also how we do it. To best ensure our goals are the same as our customers, we take a holistic approach with a total focus on results.”

A lot of that comes down to great customer relationships. Alkemi was initially using a CRM system which proved too complicated and that only unmotivated the sales team to use it. The fundamental problem was that the more complicated the software and the more functionality—which did not actually relate to what they required—it had, the more people refrained from using it.

Solution

“The solution to our problem was that we needed a simple CRM system which integrated with software that we used on a day to day basis, such as Microsoft Outlook,” Stewart said. “After all, who can go a day without checking e-mail?”

After researching several solutions, Alkemi learned of Avidian’s Prophet CRM, which completely integrates with Outlook, was very straight forward in terms of functionality, easy to use and easily tailored to meet their exact business needs.

“We chose the hosted Prophet OnDemand solution,” Stewart added. “Primarily, this was because in our industry, our team often travels interstate and overseas and it was essential that they could access Prophet from any location.”

Implementation

Prophet also featured a low start-up cost and quick installation. This proved a major benefit in terms of implementation and also with their team being able to instantly share information and start using the CRM immediately.

“Our main goal before we implemented the solution was to have a CRM system that our team was not only comfortable using, but more importantly would actually use” Stewart concluded. “Avidian provided demos and training to ensure we eased into the new CRM and our team now uses it daily. We couldn’t have asked for a more user friendly software that is useful in every stage of our business process.”