Customer Stories
- Driving Success
- Salesforce Cloud
This world leader in manufacturing supplies cutting-edge technology to the global construction industry. The overall goal was to digitise business processes by implementing Salesforce globally, as well as transform their entire Sales Operation by migrating from a task-oriented to an opportunity-oriented sales approach.
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Pexlify collaborates and works well within our project team with good engagement at all levels. They responded promptly to our requests and were able to staff the team within an agreed timeframe. On top of a good level of technical know-how of salesforce, the team has also developed a good understanding of our business processes.
THE CHALLENGE: Move 10,000+ Salespeople in 40 Countries to Salesforce - Seamlessly
This world leader in manufacturing supplies cutting-edge technology to the global construction industry. However, to stay competitive in today’s global market, businesses are under pressure to digitally transform their operations to increase efficiencies and reduce costs.
A major hindrance towards digitisation is the lower cost of production in countries with cheaper labour costs. Nonetheless, digitising business models can overcome this challenge by introducing more automation into production processes and standardising parts that can be produced at scale. Reducing manufacturing costs allows businesses to remain competitive without sacrificing quality or customer service.
This company recognised the challenge and realised the necessity to transform the way they operated. Their digital transformation focused on creating a data-centric business that drives continuous improvement through technology and analytics. This results in smarter decision-making across the entire organisation.
Furthermore, many construction projects now undergo digital planning before the actual construction starts. Increasingly, decisions about products and solutions are made well before construction begins. Therefore, it is imperative for this company to ensure their products, services and solutions are already considered when digital planning is underway. The company needed to transform their sales process as well as how they captured and stored customer information to track these new product and service opportunities.
That’s the journey they embarked on in 2019. Transformation projects don’t come much bigger or more business-critical than moving an entire global sales force from a legacy system and a traditional way of selling to a modern CRM system and a new sales method.
TRANSFORMATION AT SPEED.
To make this goal a reality, they made the strategic decision to move its 10,000+ strong global sales team from a Legacy System to Salesforce, in a major transformation project.
This transformation also included moving from a task-based selling method to an opportunity-oriented sales approach. This new sales process, with the Salesforce platform at its core, helps them identify and take advantage of new opportunities and make the most of them.
Focusing on standardisation, they are now able to streamline their supply chains and production processes. They are also able to deliver the products their customers want faster. By standardising parts, they can also make their products more customizable and flexible for their customers.
Additionally, by using IoT technology to manage and track inventory, as well as provide visibility into field operations, they can anticipate demand and continue to provide efficient customer service for all their products.
As a result, they now offer a variety of innovative and differentiated products, software, and services to help their clients improve business optimisation and productivity. These include software to help boost job site efficiency, tools with safety features to help reduce fatigue, as well as services to help cut costs.
The overall outcome for the company:
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This company is a successful global manufacturer with a mature approach to business transformation projects. It benefits from strong alignment between the business and IT, and a proven process for rolling out new systems across its regional and in-country operations.
However, this project didn’t come without risks. The company was new to Salesforce, and while it wanted to use standard functionality as much as possible, it also envisaged a need for some custom development – for example, around integrations with other core systems like SAP. The tailored solution would need to roll out without a hitch if it was to meet its two-year go-live deadline.
They were also concerned about scalability too. An initial, one-country pilot deployment of Salesforce had gone well, but would it scale to support a worldwide sales organisation with no glitches or slowdowns? And how could the company balance a culture of openness and collaboration among its sales teams with the need to keep some sensitive customer information highly protected?
THE SOLUTION: Engage External Salesforce Expertise from Pexlify
The company realised it didn’t have all these answers in-house and looked for external Salesforce expertise to augment its project team. After reviewing proposals, in 2019 it engaged Pexlify to spend two weeks reviewing the pilot and make recommendations for anything that could be done more effectively as the roll-out proper got underway.
From that first two-week engagement, the relationship between Pexlify and the company was to grow into a strategic and ongoing partnership. After Pexlify successfully delivered their initial technical review, the company understood that Pexlify could provide more than just a sounding board on the roll-out of project.
Before long, Pexlify were asked to support the development and roll-out of the Salesforce implementation in three key areas:
Architecture: The company’s new opportunity-oriented sales methodology, combined with the specialist nature of the construction industry, meant Salesforce customization was needed. Pexlify’s experienced architect was able to advise on the design of all standard and bespoke functionality – which included third-party integrations, country-level localisations, and additional security features – as well as the overall design and scalability of the Salesforce implementation.
As a result, our architect was invited to join the company’s Design Authority Board, the governance team responsible for overseeing the entire roll-out.
Development: The company asked Pexlify to develop specific functionality that would maximise the efficiency of its sales teams when using Salesforce. At the front end, this included a bespoke calendaring solution for their sales professionals, a collaboration tool to allow salespeople to communicate with back-office colleagues, and a refresh of the company’s guided selling content.
Pexlify’s developers also contributed to back-end development, to ensure optimum performance of the Salesforce solution.
Quality Assurance: With its global sales operation depending on Salesforce, the company couldn’t afford the risk of bugs, glitches, or downtime. The company looked to Pexlify for advice on quality governance across the implementation and engaged Pexlify QA professionals to work alongside the project scrum teams.
As the Salesforce implementation has grown, Pexlify has also introduced test automation across the project, to ensure quality without expanding the project team headcount.
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The Results: On-Time Global Roll-out & Successful move to Opportunity-Based Selling
With a 100+ strong team from the Company, Salesforce, and Pexlify, all working together seamlessly using agile principles, the ambitious two-year roll-out deadline was met – despite the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic a year into the project.
The company successfully went live in 40 countries with Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud in March 2021, with a structured train-the-trainer approach ensuring swift user adoption.
The company believes in making its customers’ experience quicker, easier, and more convenient by using a multi-channel approach. As a result, their customers can now buy directly through their website, manage, and renew their entire Fleet Management rental contracts in one click or request repairs in real-time.
The company has reported significant early benefits from its adoption of Salesforce, including creating leads from market opportunities identified by its field sales force; a faster-than-anticipated rate of lead acceptance; improved collaboration with Marketing; and a vibrant opportunity pipeline.
For us at Pexlify, the project has been an opportunity to support a global digital transformation project. We helped deliver a complex Salesforce implementation at an architectural level and in terms of on-the-ground development and quality assurance, working seamlessly alongside the company’s in-house business and IT teams.
With the roll-out now set to enter a new phase of expansion, we look forward to building on our existing partnership and supporting the client to gain even more value from its Salesforce investment.
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