Sharp Electronics Saves More Than $1.6 Million in Operating Costs

February 22, 2007 - Sharp Electronics Manufacturing Corporation of America has saved more than $1.6 million in operating costs using CDC Software's Pivotal MarketFirst marketing automation and lead generation solution. Sharp Electronics currently uses MarketFirst for automated lead capture and rankings from its Web site, phone calls, trade shows, events, and inbound and outbound telemarketing; lead qualification and dissemination. It also allows dealers to access lead information directly from the MarketFirst "dashboard"; creating Web pages that serve as scripts for the telemarketers; communicating with dealers; surveying and communicating with customers; and online registration for trade shows, events, training classes, seminars and Webinars. Significant results since implementing Pivotal MarketFirst include:

• Reducing cost per lead from $76 to $8
• Saving $420,000 over four years by reducing advertising agency fees by using Pivotal MarketFirst to automate tasks that the agency was performing manually;
• Labor savings of $70,000 annually due to MarketFirst's automatic lead assignment capabilities;
• Additional labor savings of more than $17,000 annually due to MarketFirst's automatic lead response emailing capabilities.

"With MarketFirst, our dealers view Sharp Electronics as having both 'state-of-the-art' products and 'state-of-the-art' marketing, making us an organization that has excellent, accurate, and timely marketing programs and campaigns," says Jerry Ganguzza, Sharp Electronic's associate director.