CONNECTING IN PHILLY

HEADNOTE

An accounting firm extends its contacts throughout Pennsylvania

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Like many other professional services companies.

Parente Randolph (PR) lacked a central repository to house its customer and prospect information. The Philadelphia accounting firm used a combination of systems that included Microsoft Outlook and paperbased tools like Rolodexes to store information. But with more than a dozen offices spread across several states, exchanging customer and prospect information had grown increasingly challenging.

For example, says Rhonda McDermott, vice president of marketing at Parente Randolph, if "someone in our Wilkes-Barre office thought of a prospect down near the Allentown area [roughly an hour away], he may contact that person, not realizing that someone in our Allentown office actually may have already had a relationship created there."

PR sought a CRM system capable of spanning across its multiple lines of business while enhancing principals' and managers' ability to uncover new business opportunities. Following the firm's evaluation of a handful of vendors, PR selected Interface Software's InterAction (now LexisNexis Interface Software), designed specifically for professional services firms.

These firms depend on social networking to tap into various sources like alumni networks and current clients to extend their business, according to Darryl Cross, director of business development at LexisNexis Interface Software. "If they tap into that, it could be their greatest asset. If they ignore it, it could be their biggest liability."

The firm's initial deployment launched in June 2001, but it has since been upgraded several times, most recently in October 2005. "Since we launched," McDermott says, "the average contacts that are now in the system-compared to what it was in the beginning-[have) doubled," increasing from about 12,000 individual contacts and 7,500 company contacts when the PR first launched, to its current figures of about 30,000 individual contacts and 16,000 companies.That's an impressive feat, considering how territorial people can be when it comes to their contacts. "They really view it as the first place to go and check for information." -C.B.