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:
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:
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:
“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:
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:
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
