Glasshouse Systems story
Glasshouse Systems is a North American provider of IT infrastructure, security, and managed services. Glasshouse Systemsheadquarters is in Toronto, with sales and technical coverage across Canada and the US. As the company has continued to grow over the past 25 years, Glasshouse Systems has added more than 250 client accounts and found itself in need of a customer relationship management (CRM) system that could enable it to manage client accounts and conduct forecasting more easily and effectively than the spreadsheets that it had previously relied on.

“We wanted a CRM tool that was more accurate and sophisticated than what we’d been using along with a solution that was customizable to meet our specific needs,” said Alex Talmor, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Glasshouse Systems.

In April 2016, Glasshouse Systems turned to Dalikoo, a Vaughan, Ontario-based CRM, document management and project management solution provider whose Microsoft Office 365 product offers various functionality and integration across multiple departments from a central location via the cloud.

“As our volume of transactions continued to grow, it became unmanageable to identify and qualify sales prospects using spreadsheets,” said Talmor. “The Dalikoo system allows our salespeople to see all of the opportunities, to track what’s in the pipe, and monitor our sales team’s progress.”

The Dalikoo platform was also less expensive and quicker to gain value from than other platforms that would have cost more due to higher licensing fees and customization requirements, said Talmor. By implementing Dalikoo, this also enabled Glasshouse Systems to stay on Office 365 without forcing a migration to another environment, Talmor added.

Next-generation Function-as-a-Service

Dalikoo’s platform is part of an emerging class of cloud computing services known as ‘Function-as-a-Service’ which provides clients a platform to develop, manage, and run organizational activities such as managing the sales pipeline without the complexity of building and maintaining an infrastructure to support it.

“We don’t require server farms or the need to compile code on any servers,” said Arik Kalininsky, CEO at Dalikoo.“We code directly into the platform, which takes our .NET and Java script directly into SharePoint and SharePoint runs the executable for us. At Dalikoo, our code is 100% server-less without any infrastructure,” Kalininsky adds.

But what occurs behind the scenes is generally not of interest to sales, marketing, and other executives who have been drawn to the platform for its simplicity and elegance. Dalikoo customers say they like the centralization and ease-of-use offered by the platform which requires very little training compared to other CRM systems. Further, the document management and project management tools in Dalikoo are also simple to use and work in conjunction with the CRM to give the company a “one-stop-shop” for all of its business management needs.

The logical design of the Dalikoo platform was a big selling point for Kasa Koncept, a kitchen manufacturer that’s based in Costa Rica. “Dalikoo is a very user-friendly platform to use and is written in Spanish for us which is very helpful,” said Kasa Koncept Owner Joseph Gabriel. (Kalininsky adds that translation into any language is a simple and free process that can be done in a matter of hours). “But the main thing is that it combines many of our organizational activities in a sequence that’s suitable for our operations,” said Gabriel.

For instance, Dalikoo’s CRM system is used by 50 employees, including members of Kasa Koncept’s sales team as well as its operations and administrative departments to track customer orders and monitor transactions. “This is the first system I’ve found that can help us manage all of these activities from a single location,” said Gabriel.

For its part, Glasshouse Systems has also extended the Dalikoo platform to members of its technical staff and its administrative team to enable them to retrieve documents related to customer orders, price quotes, proposals, invoicing and collections.

“For our business, the Dalikoo platform has provided us with clarity on how the business is performing in different domains, along with what’s coming into the pipe,” said Talmor. “It has enabled us to document the sales process. It’s been absolutely key to our business.”

credits to: HMG Strategy