Ashland Partners & Company was founded in 1992 for the purpose of providing verification services to the investment management industry. Headquartered in Medford, Oregon with offices in Boston and Jersey City, NJ, Ashland employs nine business development professionals and over twenty-five CPA and finance professionals who work on business development issues. In its twelve plus years of business, Ashland has gained broad-based experience servicing clients that employ a wide array of investment strategies. Ashland has offices located in key client markets and has developed technology solutions and a workflow approach that promote engagement efficiency while enhancing internal information sharing and external service delivery.

Ashland’s client base represents the majority of all currently verified U.S. advisers. During 2004, they expanded their client base by 67, bringing the total number of clients to just over 225. In the first six months of 2005, the firm has increased its client base by 82, an increase of over 100 percent from last year – and the year is only half over.

Challenges

Today’s regulatory environment in the investment community has led to an increase in firms needing Ashland’s verification and compliance consulting services. However, in order to acquire new clients without having to add additional resources, Ashland would need to be more efficient and effective in their business development efforts. The sales management system they were using was a mixture of using the contact and category features of Outlook while generating reports in Excel – a common practice for many emerging companies.

“We were starting to have a difficult time servicing all of our prospective clients,” said Tobin S. Cochran, Partner & President of Ashland. “Potential clients were getting follow-up calls from multiple Ashland professionals and we had a few cases where we were not following-up in a timely fashion.”

With professional staff distributed across the country, natural issues with prospect contact overlap, dropped balls on follow-up and confusion over who is responsible for what, became more prominent as growth accelerated. It was clear Ashland needed a more organized approach to managing the sales process in order to grow more efficiently.

Solution

Ashland went through the process of researching several different solutions for managing sales opportunities, including GoldMine, Microsoft CRM and Prophet 2004 from Avidian Technologies.

“We were looking for something that was fairly intuitive and would allow us to transition into a more effective opportunity management system as easily as possible,” explained Cochran. “We also wanted something that would allow us to connect the contacts and prospects that all of our professionals were working on so we could see the funnel and manage the process from the top down.”

As soon as Cochran and his team saw how Prophet was integrated into Outlook and realized that they wouldn’t have to re-enter or re-learn their contact system, they knew it was the right solution for them. Ashland selected the Server Edition of Prophet 2004 with 15 seats and implemented it at the beginning of 2005.

“Our sole concern was whether or not Prophet could grow with us as we went mobile,” said Cochran. “Avidian was already working on a Palm version of Prophet to support the Palm handheld device when we were deciding to buy, so the timing was perfect.”

Implementation

One of the first benefits Ashland experienced using Prophet was that it provided a road map to assist them in establishing a more formal growth strategy for their firm. Many companies in a new or rapid growth mode haven’t identified the discrete steps or stages in a sales process, which hinders the understanding, measuring and reporting on business development opportunities.

“The way the fields are laid out and the logical progression of the growth stages were extremely helpful to us in determining how we, as an international organization, were going to manage a larger number of opportunities” explained.Cochran. “Having Prophet build on top of our contacts and allow us to stay inside of Outlook for appointments, emails, contact and opportunity information, and tasks and notes, made the formalization of the sales process that much easier.”

In addition to having a more structured sales process allowing for a more efficient measurement, management and reporting system, Ashland has seen the following additional benefits:

• Rapid deployment and implementation – Ashland was actively utilizing Prophet within days of installation. They made a company-wide decision to start using it as soon as the process was described and set-up in Prophet, which led to wide spread implementation quickly.
• Going mobile with Prophet for Palm – Much of Ashland’s professional staff spend one to two weeks at a time on the road meeting and working with clients. Use of Prophet for Palm allows them to create, edit and manage contacts while in trains, planes, automobiles and client offices.
• Managing an increase in client growth with the same number of professionals – Ashland has obtained more clients in the first six months of 2005 than in all of 2004. Cochran believes having Prophet has given them the confidence to handle the extra contacts much more efficiently and effectively.
• Extending Prophet into workflow of current clients – One of the unexpected benefits of using the customizable fields in Prophet is that Ashland is now experimenting with extending the use of the solution into managing project based workflow with current clients. Each new project or on-going project can be scheduled and managed as an opportunity.

“We live in the opportunity manager in Prophet,” said Cochran. “The ease with which we can get at information and status of various prospects or projects makes it a natural fit for our on-going, project-based scheduling with our current clients.”

“The biggest difference for us now is structure,” said Cochran. “We can now manage the sales process instead of it managing us. We are able to extend our services to a larger prospective client base in a more organized fashion – without having to expend additional resources.”

Growing businesses that are Outlook-centric in their communications can benefit from being more organized at the sales and marketing level. Prophet 2004 from Avidian is the perfect solution for these types of businesses that want to establish a sales process and step into a more profitable and efficient way of growing their client base.