SERAKU Co., Ltd. / SERAKU CCC Co., Ltd.

Abe

Seraku Co., Ltd. has two main business pillars. The first is our Digital Integration business. This consists of the System Integration domain, which focuses on IT system and infrastructure operation support, and the cloud system adoption support domain, primarily for 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 with a focus on agriculture, and NewtonX, a ChatGPT service for corporations.
The premise for implementing uSonar products this time lies in our internal utilization of Salesforce. We have been Salesforce users since around 2007. We use Salesforce for almost all of our core systems, not just sales management—this includes daily pipeline management, tracking recruitment yield rates (which is critical for us), analyzing performance by interviewer, and managing contracts and accounting. As a result, many of our employees are very familiar with the platform. When we first started using it, we found it extremely difficult to master Salesforce on our own. Based on the hypothesis that this need existed in the market, we commercialized our adoption support service in 2013.

Abe

While my primary responsibilities are as the Business Manager for Seraku CCC and the Sales Manager for NewtonX, I also concurrently serve as a Marketing Specialist for the Sales Strategy Promotion Office at Seraku headquarters. In this project, I am responsible for the utilization, adoption, and deployment of uSonar across the entire group. Since the implementation of uSonar requires tight integration with Salesforce, the Seraku CCC team is primarily responsible for this initiative.

A.J.

I belong to the Sales Department at the Yokohama Branch of Seraku headquarters. My daily mission involves proposing managed services, such as addressing the needs for resident system infrastructure engineers. In this project regarding the introduction and internal utilization of uSonar products, such as SideSonar and mSonar, I act as a leader who consolidates requests from the field perspective and drives results through actual usage. I organize and facilitate meetings to discuss how our sales team can most effectively utilize uSonar services.

Abe

First, the primary purpose of using uSonar is for what we call 'new business development' to find new clients. Beyond that, our second main use case is for 'account expansion' within our group, specifically targeting client companies where our current reach is limited and we only have contact with a few departments.

A.J.

Regarding the scale of utilization, we have started by focusing on 70 to 80 sales members nationwide. We have assigned about two people from each department, including both section managers and younger staff. Some members are already using it quite 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 throughout the country. It is being utilized by over 10 departments and branches, including the three Tokyo metropolitan area divisions of Seraku, 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 connection through a business alliance in 2018, so some of us were aware of uSonar. However, to advance our B2B ABM strategy, we were actually contracted with a different corporate data provider and a business card management service. The challenge was that we were not seeing the expected results relative to the costs. Our management team began asking about the status of our ABM initiatives.

Abe

As I mentioned at the beginning, we provide Salesforce adoption support services to our clients, but at the same time, we faced the challenge of wanting to further improve the quality of our own new business development. We also felt that by properly promoting an ABM strategy, we could further maximize our utilization of Salesforce. ABM is a sales style that treats customers as individual companies and tracks progress by department, and I believe it is an effective B2B sales strategy that fits the data-driven era.
To advance an ABM strategy, it is generally considered that the following four points are essential:

1: Linking external corporate data provider services with SFA
2: Appending the latest external corporate data to your own customer data stored in SFA
3: Cleansing and consolidating data within SFA
4: Managing information from business cards exchanged by sales staff and linking it with SFA

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

Abe

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

Abe

Certainly. We decided to set aside its use for pure new business development for the time being and instead thoroughly utilize uSonar to activate cross-selling across our nationwide branches and business divisions. We were confident that this would ensure a tangible return on investment. We could state this with certainty because we knew that uSonar's data systematically codes companies nationwide at the level of individual business locations.

Abe

By using the LBC code from uSonar, we anticipated the ability to share customer information across our group's locations, such as 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 understand our customers at the level of individual business locations, such as "Corporation A has a Yokohama branch and a Nagoya factory. Seraku's Yokohama branch has an account, but the Nagoya branch does not yet have a contract. There is room for us to pursue this." Once visualized in this way, we can promote the sharing of customer information between Seraku Yokohama and Seraku Nagoya, and I was confident that account-based marketing, or 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 expect much confusion. Rather, I felt I could explain the benefits of a unified implementation to the field team by saying, "Instead of using standalone tools for each task, business card management has now been included in our sales development system."

Abe

It took about three months after I joined the project. I believe that implementation and operation within six months is extremely fast for a SaaS-based service that handles corporate data.

Abe

By switching to ABM-focused data and business card management simultaneously, 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 the perspective of our sales operations, not only that, but with our ABM strategy now fully operational, we have already exceeded our defined ROI targets by 180%. I believe that if we had continued using Salesforce with our previous scheme, the potential we could have leveraged from Salesforce would have been limited. I can say that by introducing uSonar, our ABM has begun to function properly as a customer acquisition tool. On a more granular level, we have reduced the manual effort required for tasks such as resolving data entry inconsistencies, which has naturally increased the time our team can spend engaging with customers. Furthermore, the pure increase in the number of target companies registered in Salesforce has been a significant benefit.

Abe

There have been significant benefits for the sales team as well. What I would call the "democratization of tools" has occurred. Because of cost constraints, the service we used previously could only be accessed by a limited number of senior-level staff, resulting in a top-down flow of information where the field team had to work based on lists created by those senior members. However, the appeal of the scheme proposed by uSonar is that it allows us to create an environment where a large number of sales personnel can log in for the same cost. Sales staff in the field can now freely create their own targeting lists. This has fostered a sense of autonomy; rather than just approaching customers based on a master list handed down from above, a vitality for autonomous outreach has emerged. With an environment that everyone can use, we have standardized terminology such as "industry characteristics" and "market penetration rates," which has improved communication efficiency—a benefit that is not immediately visible but highly impactful.

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 conceptual definitions of industries 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 about their approach methods and develop greater autonomy.

Abe

While our previous business card management system handled the basic task of importing exchanged business cards, it did not effectively leverage that information for marketing activities. By integrating mSonar with Salesforce, business card information is accumulated directly, allowing us to utilize it for marketing immediately.

A.J.

Since mSonar also integrates with SideSonar, I frequently use the "Meishi Shogi" feature within SideSonar. My impression of our previous business card management service was that it only displayed information from the cards we had imported. However, Meishi Shogi allows us to see which colleagues are approaching which departments, and it even provides information on executives with whom we have not yet exchanged business cards, which is extremely convenient.

Abe

Many of our team members primarily use mSonar for importing business cards and use SideSonar for outreach. The ability to connect to corporate data regardless of the imported business cards is a major differentiator from other business card management services.

Abe

The "Rating 2.0" AI engine is incredible; it uses machine learning to analyze trends in past transaction data—such as annual revenue and number of employees—to generate lists of similar target companies, including those we have yet to approach. At our company, we input past customer lists into Rating 2.0 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 working on utilizing "Live Access." This is an initiative to identify companies visiting our website based on IP domain units. It allows us to see which companies are potential customers before they become leads. Digital sales, which seeks out future customers based on various past behavioral data, has begun.

A.J.

I use it quite extensively. A unique way I use it is by filtering with the keyword "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.

It is true that "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 "Stories" 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 "Interested in Data Centers."

Abe

I truly appreciate the detailed explanations of the features and how to use them. Furthermore, I would like to learn more about specific use cases. I would love to see an expanded collection of tips, including how other companies are innovating and cases where trials did not go as planned. I also hope for more opportunities for information exchange with other users, a more robust user community, and user meetings. Data utilization is inevitably accompanied by failures, and those failures are also valuable data. I hope we can share these experiences among those of us working on data utilization.

Abe

Until now, corporate sales—especially new business development—have unfortunately relied heavily on individual 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 aspired 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 now create strategies based on our own data. As I mentioned earlier, it is perfectly fine if those strategies miss the mark. A failed attempt is still valuable data, which we can use to refine our next strategy. I hope to accelerate this sales cycle even further.

Furthermore, I believe that strong sales organizations achieve results in new business development and tend to have a higher receptivity to new tools and systems. I feel there is a certain correlation there. In fact, the people currently securing new projects at our company are those who have started to master uSonar products.
Of course, there are still areas where we are not fully utilizing the tools, 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 shifting our sales style from person-dependent methods to "Digital Sales" driven by ABM has become clear since we introduced uSonar.

Finally, starting with our own thorough utilization of uSonar, we would like to launch a service to support the introduction and adoption of 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.