CEREC Inc. and CEREC CCC Inc.

Abe

The business of Seraku Co., Ltd. is built on two main pillars. The first is our Digital Integration business. This consists of a system integration domain, primarily focused on IT system and infrastructure operational support, and a cloud system adoption and utilization support domain, centered on Salesforce, provided by our dedicated subsidiary, Seraku CCC. The second is our Internet Services business, which includes Midori Cloud, a SaaS platform for the primary industry—specifically agriculture—and NewtonX, a ChatGPT service for corporate clients.
The premise for our adoption of uSonar products lies in our internal utilization of Salesforce. We have been Salesforce users since around 2007. We use it for almost all of our core systems, not just sales management, but also daily pipeline management, recruitment yield management—which is critical for us—performance analysis for each interviewer, contracts, and accounting. As a result, many of our employees are very familiar with it. During the early stages of our own implementation, I felt that mastering Salesforce in-house was extremely difficult. Based on the hypothesis that this need existed in the market, we commercialized it as an adoption support service starting in 2013.

Abe

My primary responsibilities are as the business manager for Seraku CCC and the sales manager for NewtonX, while concurrently serving in the Marketing Department of Seraku's Sales Strategy Promotion Office. In this instance, I am in charge of the utilization, adoption, and deployment of uSonar across the entire group. Since uSonar integrates closely with Salesforce, the Seraku CCC team is primarily responsible for its implementation.

A.J.

I belong to the Sales Department at the Yokohama Branch of Seraku's headquarters. My daily mission involves proposal activities related to managed services, such as needs for resident engineers for system infrastructure. In this project for the introduction and internal utilization of uSonar products, such as Side Sonar and mSonar, I serve as a leader in gathering requests from the field perspective and ensuring we achieve results through actual usage. I set up and facilitate review meetings to discuss how our sales team can most effectively utilize uSonar services.

Abe

Our primary objective for using uSonar is to facilitate new business development, which involves identifying and acquiring new customers. Furthermore, we utilize it for deep-dive sales activities within our group, specifically targeting client companies where our current engagement is limited to only a few departments. These two areas represent our main use cases.

A.J.

In terms of scale, we have initially rolled out the tool to 70 to 80 sales members nationwide. We have assigned approximately two individuals from each division, including both managers and junior staff. Some members are already utilizing the platform extensively, and we intend to gradually increase the overall active usage rate. A key feature is that it is being used across the entire group in various regions nationwide. It is currently deployed in over 10 departments and branches, including the three main Seraku divisions in the Tokyo metropolitan area, the COMPANY division, the Midori Cloud division, the NewtonX division, our four regional branches in Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, and Fukuoka, as well as Seraku CCC.

Abe

We had a business partnership established in 2018, so some of us were familiar with uSonar. However, we were actually using a different corporate data provider and business card management service to drive our B2B ABM strategy. The challenge was that we were not seeing the expected results relative to the costs incurred. Our management team eventually began questioning the status of our ABM initiatives.

Abe

As I mentioned at the beginning, we provide Salesforce adoption support services to our clients. At the same time, we faced the challenge of needing to improve the quality of our own new business development efforts. We also felt that by effectively promoting an ABM strategy, we could further maximize our utilization of Salesforce. ABM is a sales style that treats each customer as an individual entity and tracks progress by department; I believe it is an effective B2B sales strategy that fits the data-driven era.
Generally, the following four points are considered essential for advancing an ABM strategy:

1: Integrating external corporate data services with SFA
2: Appending the latest external corporate data to our own customer data stored in SFA
3: Cleansing, deduplicating, and centralizing data within SFA
4: Managing information from exchanged business cards and integrating it with SFA

To solve these four challenges simultaneously, we decided to replace our existing products with uSonar after conducting a thorough comparative review.

Abe

Yes, management was concerned about whether switching to uSonar would truly deliver the necessary ROI and results, even for the sake of advancing our ABM strategy. As the team driving the ABM strategy, we even felt a sense of urgency that if we could not recover our initial investment and demonstrate ROI within the first year, we would not be able to continue the contract.

Abe

Yes. We decided to set aside its use for pure new business development for the time being and instead focus on leveraging uSonar to revitalize cross-selling across our nationwide branches and business divisions. We were confident that this approach would yield tangible results. We could say this with certainty because we knew that uSonar’s data systematically codes companies across the country down to the level of individual business locations.

Abe

By using uSonar’s LBC codes, we anticipated the ability to share customer information across our group locations, such as between Nagoya and Yokohama. The corporate data service we used previously only provided information at the headquarters level. In other words, our understanding was limited to the granularity of knowing that "Seraku holds an account (contract) with Corporation A." However, by overlaying uSonar’s data with our own, we can see that "Corporation A has a Yokohama branch and a Nagoya factory. While Seraku’s Yokohama branch has an account, the Nagoya branch does not yet have a contract. This is an opportunity to pursue." This makes it possible to understand customers at the level of individual business establishments. Once visualized in this way, we can facilitate the sharing of customer information between Seraku Yokohama and Seraku Nagoya, which gave us the conviction that account-based marketing—true ABM—would accelerate.

Abe

We were using a major service for business card management as well, but we switched to mSonar in May 2023. Since we had only been using the previous service for one to three years, I did not anticipate much disruption. In fact, I felt we could explain the benefits of a unified implementation to our staff by stating, "Instead of using standalone tools, business card management is now included within our sales development system."

Abe

It had been about three months since I joined the project. I believe that implementation and operation within six months is exceptionally fast for a SaaS-based service that handles corporate data.

Abe

By switching to a combined solution for ABM data and business card management, we reduced costs by approximately 40% compared to our previous setup. This was a major benefit, as it was a primary concern for our management team. From a sales operations perspective, beyond just cost savings, the full-scale launch of our ABM strategy has resulted in ROI already exceeding 180% of our established targets. I believe the potential of Salesforce would have been limited if we had continued using our previous scheme for ABM. By introducing uSonar, we can say that ABM has truly begun to function effectively for customer acquisition. On a granular level, we have reduced the manual effort required to resolve data inconsistencies during entry, which has naturally increased the time our team can spend engaging with customers. Furthermore, a significant benefit has been the net increase in the number of target customer companies registered in Salesforce.

Abe

There were significant benefits for our sales teams. What I would call the democratization of tools occurred. Previously, due to cost constraints, only senior-level staff could access our services, resulting in a top-down flow of information where the field team had to work from lists created by management. However, the scheme proposed by uSonar was attractive because it allowed us to create an environment where a large number of sales personnel could log in at the same cost. Field sales staff can now freely create their own targeting lists. This has fostered a sense of democracy, and rather than just approaching prospects based on a master list dictated from above, a vitality has emerged that allows them to approach prospects autonomously. With an environment that everyone can use, we have standardized terminology such as "industry characteristics" and "market penetration rates," which has also led to an intangible but significant improvement in communication efficiency.

A.J.

Previously, managers tended to create targeting lists focused on credit-related factors like corporate capital and annual sales. Since we started using uSonar, our definitions of industry segments have aligned, and I feel that our methods for creating targeting lists have gradually become standardized. I also feel that using uSonar helps "Digital Sales" function effectively, as it fosters a culture where sales personnel think for themselves and develop autonomy in their approach methods.

Abe

Our previous business card management system only handled the bare minimum of importing exchanged business cards, but it was not effectively utilized for marketing activities. Because mSonar integrates with Salesforce, business card information is accumulated directly, allowing us to use it for marketing immediately.

A.J.

Since mSonar also integrates with SideSonar, I frequently use the "Meishi Shogi" (Business Card Shogi) feature. With our previous business card management service, it felt like only the information from the imported cards was available. However, with Meishi Shogi, I can see which colleagues are approaching which departments, and it even displays information on executives with whom we have not yet exchanged business cards, which is extremely convenient.

Abe

Many users primarily utilize mSonar for business card ingestion, while leveraging Side Sonar for outreach. The ability to connect to corporate data regardless of the ingested business cards is a major differentiator from other business card management services.

Abe

The AI engine "Rating2.0" is remarkable; it uses machine learning to analyze trends in past transaction data—such as annual revenue and employee count—to generate lists of similar target companies, including those we have yet to approach. At our company, we input past customer lists into Rating2.0 by division and region to generate lists of future prospects. As a result, we have discovered companies we previously overlooked, which has improved the comprehensiveness of our customer lists.
We are also in the process of implementing "Live Access." This initiative allows us to identify companies visiting our website based on IP domains. It provides visibility into which companies are potential leads before they officially enter the pipeline. Digital sales, which proactively identifies future customers based on various historical behavioral data, has begun.

A.J.

I use it quite extensively. A unique way I use it is by filtering with keywords in the "Corporate Summary." It leads to discoveries like, "I didn't know this company existed." It also allows other team members to approach companies that haven't been contacted yet.

A.J.

Certainly, Trans can accurately append corporate attribute data to company lists not yet registered in Salesforce, or to lists of business cards collected at exhibitions. It is also interesting that Story allows for segmenting lists based on various axes such as industry or IR (securities reports). At our company, we monitor stories like 'SFA-implemented companies' or 'system subsidiaries,' and we also utilize intent data lists such as 'engineer recruitment' or 'interest in data centers.'

Abe

Detailed explanations of functions and usage are very much appreciated. Furthermore, I would like to know more about use cases. I would like to see an enriched collection of tips, including how other companies are innovating and even cases that were tried but did not succeed. I would also appreciate the expansion of information exchange with other users, a user community, and user meetings. Failure is an inherent part of data utilization, and failure itself is valuable data, so I hope we can share these experiences among those of us working on data utilization.

Abe

Corporate sales, especially new business development, have traditionally relied heavily on individual past knowledge and experience. However, since we started using uSonar, we have begun to realize 'data-driven sales,' including ABM strategies, which our company has long aimed to achieve.
Honestly, 'hitting the target based on past experience to acquire new business' is a rare case and lacks reproducibility. With ABM, we can create strategies based on our own data. As I mentioned earlier, it is fine if those strategies miss the mark. A miss is also valuable data, which we can use to formulate the next strategy. I hope to accelerate this sales cycle even further.

Also, I feel that strong sales organizations achieve results in new business development and have a high receptivity to new tools and systems. I believe there is a certain correlation there. In fact, there is a trend that the people currently acquiring new projects at our company are those who have started to master uSonar products.
Of course, there are still areas where it is not being used, and because new business development is inherently inefficient, people tend to avoid it. To meet targets, there is a tendency to rely on deep-dive sales. However, I feel that the direction of our company's sales, shifting from a personnel-dependent style to 'digital sales' through ABM, has become clear since we introduced uSonar.

Finally, starting from our own thorough utilization of uSonar, we would like to release an implementation and adoption support service for ABM uSonar × Salesforce for our clients. As sales activities become increasingly difficult year by year, the number of required systems continues to grow. On the other hand, the reality is that mastering these systems is extremely difficult for Japanese companies in terms of culture and skills. I hope to use our own implementation and utilization as a strong case study to provide persuasive proposals to our clients and contribute to the sales transformation of Japanese companies.