Contrary to the general misconception, Salesforce goes beyond converting more leads and closing more deals. A key and a critical goal is also to improve customer experience and sales operations. Here is a classic case of a hundred-year-old manufacturing organization who set out to transform their customer experience and internal sales processes through the implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud.

The client was coming from two CRM implementation failures and is determined to make it work through Salesforce Sales Cloud. The previous two implementations needed too much customization, an army of engineers to manage and lower adoption. This is when Brillio was engaged, amidst the skeptical environment, to do a fresh implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Siloed sales operations leading to sales inefficiencies

The client’s sales operations and business processes have been working in silos and creating a lot of duplication. E.g. The CRM was used by sales, marketing, support, dealers and the leadership team. The absence of a single customer record meant that the same customer had multiple records with varied details. The sales manager wasn’t able to get a singular view of a customer. In addition, the sales reports were taking way too long to compile and consolidate. The report was expected to be first made by the Sales Rep who then sends it to Regional Sales and finally reaches the Zonal Sales. The client was using a different BI tool to abstract the data from the CRM and then compile the report. The entire process used to take about 15 days denying any opportunity for the Sales Head to make accurate forecast of the sales pipeline.

Here is the consolidated list of challenges that the client was facing:

• Lack of account hierarchy and inability to visualize the accounts
• Visualizing the account sales data on a monthly basis
• Create instant and accurate monthly reports that is flexible to be compiled across sales hierarchy
• Ability to capture sales activities and customer conversations that happen at each location
• Overlaps with two salespeople or channel partners working on the same account
• Manual entry of sales data into excel sheets and then uploaded into the inhouse BI-tool for reporting and visualization

Salesforce implementation is as good as the business goals

Brillio’s consulting team began the engagement with in-depth discovery process of the customer journey, sales process and key business goals. We used our proprietary “CRM Goals Alignment Framework” to understand the perspectives of the leadership team. At the end of this exercise, we recommended four key business goals:

• Break down internal silos and create a single view of the customer to understand the customer completely
• Enhance collaboration amongst the team and the management to reduce duplication and faster decision making
• Influence and improve sales opportunities to close more deals
• Increase the team bandwidth by reducing the data entry time into CRM to help them get more customer time and sell more

Persona-led design changes everything about Salesforce Sales Cloud

The business goals were set, and the next phase was to understand what the processes on the ground and what modules are required to achieve the goals. We used our custom “Persona-led Design” approach to ensure that we design the right customer journey that is in alignment with the business outcomes. Brillio experts met all the business process leaders and conducted focused interviews. The personas included – Sales manager, regional managers, regional directors, VPs and President. Key aspects covered in the discovery:

• Stages of customer journey
• Sales, marketing and service processes and its consistency across divisions
• Roles of team members at each stage of the sales cycle
• Reports and dashboards that are relevant to the leaders
• Customer data model and taxonomy used
• Opportunity stages
• Interactions with the customers
• Various processes, such as billing, CPQ, lead to cash, support management etc.

“Day in the life of” approach

“Day in a life” is a path breaking approach that helps each persona to model their behavior with the high-performer behaviors. E.g. we understood the role of sales manager and aligned the system with what she does in a given day – get full view of opportunities, tasks for the day, full view of contacts, top leads for the day, sales meetings etc. This helped each persona to stay focused to their role and improve their productivity too.

100% CRM adoption through rapid prototypes and focused training

In addition to the Salesforce Consultants, the Brillio team had Salesforce configurator and the UX expert to build rapid prototypes and check the feasibility. These prototypes ensured that the actual users of the platform are satisfied with the features and the UI. Importantly, we got the buy-in instantly. E.g. We quickly built three column vs two column layouts, information coverage in one screen etc.

During the development phase we used as much as 80% of out of the box features from the salesforce and just 20% custom code. Importantly, the screens we developed were customized to each persona in the organization and aligned with their roles. Key features include:

• Configured user specific personalized Home Pages to have a view of Account details
• Built customized lightning pages to capture meeting call summary and generate Account reports from the Account details page based on Sales data
• Created custom Account tabs corresponding to each of the divisions
• Integrated Salesforce Cloud and the client’s BI tool
• Created custom objects like Key Initiatives to create Opportunities without Account details recorded on salesforce
• Built reports like Account and territory wise Unit actuals vs Objectives for different roles, actuals Vs objective for marginal revenue

The new implementation and key features were presented at the annual sales conference to generate the initial excitement. Several training programs were arranged later on to improve and sustain the adoption of the Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Unleashing the power of Salesforce Sales Cloud

Sales is a transformed team now which is highly productive and solely focusing on improving the customer experience. The key results include:

• 100% user adoption of the Salesforce Sales Cloud
• At least 15% improvement in the sales productivity just after a month into the new implementation (at the time of writing this case study)
• 90% of web features available on mobile implementation
• Reduction in report and insights generation time from weeks to few hours
• A singular record of customer reducing duplication of efforts between the sales team and the dealers
• Accurate and near real-time reports ensuring effective sales forecasting
• Chatter ensured a high-level of collaboration amongst the sales teams

Interested in a quick health assessment of your Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation or want to explore how can Salesforce add more value to your organization? each out to our Salesforce experts at info@brillio.com