USSI Cleans Up with Entellium; Commercial Contract Cleaner Gains Competitive Edge with Hosted CRM

Business Wire, August 24, 2006

SEATTLE -- Entellium (www.entellium.com) today announced that USSI, Inc. (www.ussiclean.com) has turned to Entellium's hosted CRM solution to help it sweep up every opportunity in the highly competitive commercial cleaning market. By using a powerful CRM tool in place of a manual spreadsheet and contact manager-based approach, USSI gains a strong competitive advantage in tracking leads and sales opportunities.

Founded in 1912, USSI established itself as the pre-eminent commercial contract cleaner in Florida and the Washington, D.C./Baltimore metro area. The company services over 25 million square feet of commercial space daily. It is the first building service contractor east of the Mississippi to use an advanced cleaning process called (OS1)(TM) that promotes cleaning for health, improved indoor air quality and the use of environmentally friendly cleaning products and methods.

Just as USSI's cleaning teams fight dirt and grime on a daily basis, the company's sales and marketing teams battle intense price-driven competition, increasing the need for state-of-the-art tools like the (OS1) process and Entellium. The company faces another challenge as well --getting accurate market intelligence. For instance, external services that monitor the going rates for commercial cleaning contracts simply don't exist.

"Entellium will help us gain deep insight into the competitive situation in each of the markets we serve," said Lisa Mielke, Vice President, Business Development for USSI. "Over time, we will be able to track trends about retention, what the competitors are bidding, and who we are losing business to. This information will help us sharpen our offers and come out on top more often."

Before turning to Entellium, USSI found that many of the details it needed to track market trends were contained in different incompatible formats and applications on individual computers, making it difficult to analyze trends with any precision. More troubling, sales opportunities weren't being pursued as thoroughly as possible.

To move to the next level, USSI wanted a hosted CRM solution that would provide centralized Web-based access, a consistent method for capturing data, plus full support and training. The company considered both Entellium and Salesforce.com but had concerns over the latter's many service outages, overall lack of usability and high cost.

"For our needs, Entellium was far superior," said Mielke. "Our sales team isn't necessarily tech-savvy. We didn't feel that we could put them in front of Salesforce.com and expect them to be successful. In comparison, Entellium is very easy to use and enables us to gradually start using more features over time as people learn the system."

A contributing factor to USSI's success, according to Mielke, is Entellium's commitment to customer support. Entellium is the only hosted CRM provider to offer 24/7 premium support to every user, including a named account manager -- all at no charge, thus enhancing its value to customers.

"Mid-market businesses today face unprecedented levels of competition," said Natalee Roan, Chief Marketing Officer for Entellium. "As USSI illustrates, CRM can make a big difference in helping companies seize every available opportunity. But to get the benefits, the software has to be easy enough for everyone on the sales team to put to productive use immediately. This is where Entellium shines, especially against companies like Salesforce.com that are focused on enterprise CRM."

About Entellium

Founded in 2000, Entellium offers a suite of CRM solutions designed specifically for small and midsize companies and divisions of large enterprises that want a powerful solution that strikes the right balance between the everyday needs of sales and service representatives and the reporting requirements of management. Entellium has won several industry awards for innovation in usability, and was recently recognized by Forrester Research for top scores in Usability and Cost among leading CRM providers (The Forrester Wave: Hosted Sales Force Automation, Q1 2005(1)). Entellium is also the recipient of the Frost and Sullivan 2005 Customer Service Leadership award for outstanding service to its customers. Entellium is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with a global R&D Center in Malaysia and sales operating worldwide via its partner network. For more information, visit http://www.entellium.com.

(1) The Forrester Wave: Hosted Sales Force Automation, Q1 2005, L. Herbert (with Erin Kinikin and Jessica Harrington), March 31, 2005.