Salesforce Manufacturing CRM for Sales Optimization and Quote Management

Consistent and transparent sales data in a centralized CRM system
Mobile CRM for field sales reps
Reduced quote approval time
30% more won opportunities

Expertise

Web & Enterprise Portals

Business Process Automation

Verticals

Manufacturing

Technologies

Cloud

Iflexion optimized Salesforce CRM for manufacturing to enhance the customer’s sales processes and speed up quote management.

Months

Person-months

Context
Solution
Development Process
Technologies
Results

Context

Customer

The company is a US manufacturer of customizable heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment (HVAC).

Challenge

Without a manufacturing CRM in place, on-site and field sales teams had to struggle with notes scattered across several outdated tools. For this reason, there were risks sales reps could create a duplicate account, forget to warm up a lead or follow up on an opportunity. Contact and interaction details were often missing in lead and account profiles, which affected customer experience. Also, as the sales team was spreading countrywide, it was getting impossible to monitor sales reps’ performance in a centralized way.

Inefficient quoting practices, such as emailing PDFs and keeping information in Excel spreadsheets, led to poor inventory visibility and long sales cycles. All this, in turn, resulted in losing business opportunities.

To remove the stumbling blocks on the road to growth, the HVAC manufacturer turned to certified Salesforce consultants at Iflexion.

Solution

Iflexion’s team tailored the Salesforce CRM for HVAC manufacturing processes, covering three key areas.

Management of on-site sales teams

We configured the sales pipeline and notifications to help the sales reps keep an eye on every lead, guiding them until they convert leads into opportunities and, ultimately, customers. This customized Salesforce tool for guided selling allowed the sales reps to quickly shortlist the products relevant to every lead’s request.

The visibility into the performance of sales teams on the whole and each rep in particular was achieved with the dashboards and reports that our team configured in line with the HVAC manufacturer’s internal workflows.

Management of field sales reps

To increase the field team’s productivity, Iflexion customized the mobile version of the Salesforce manufacturing CRM for placing orders and capturing sales activities on the fly. We also created a custom calculator to help field specialists quickly estimate projects costs, apply discounts, as well show differences with competitors’ prices. Together with the manufacturer’s sales leaders, we designed event-triggered sales aids that enabled field specialists to better pitch the equipment to potential customers.

Quote management and invoicing

Iflexion’s team went for Salesforce CPQ to help the HVAC manufacturer fix their inefficient quoting processes. Configured by our developers, the quote approval workflows run in sync across several departments. The Salesforce system was also fine-tuned to automatically generate orders and invoices.

Development Process

During six months, our Salesforce experts, including a project manager, a business analyst, a technical lead, 3 developers, and 2 QA engineers, were working on the manufacturing CRM solution.

Iflexion’s consultants analyzed the manufacturer’s business needs and recommended relevant Salesforce tools for customization before designing the solution. The Salesforce implementation was broken down in phases with early deliverables so that the manufacturer could start using the most business-critical tools as soon as possible. We configured the Salesforce default kit for the manufacturing specifics and coded custom features to reflect the customer’s internal processes in particular.

Through daily stand-up meetings and weekly video conferences, we kept the company in the picture on the project progress as well as caught up on implementation details.

Results

As a result of partnership with Iflexion, the customer has successfully adopted a custom Salesforce CRM for manufacturing. The impact of the project was visible across business functions:

Sales management became easy and transparent as all the data captured by both on-site and field sales teams was synchronized and stored in a single place.
Productivity tools, such as convenient dashboards, visual selling guidelines, and a customized quote calculator help sales reps win more deals.
Thanks to new quote management practices, the quote approval time shrank from several days to a couple of hours.
As sales reps were able to respond to leads and quote request faster, the company started to win on average 30% more deals compared to the pre-Salesforce period.

The results of using this Salesforce CRM for manufacturing encouraged the customer to continue cooperation with Iflexion—this time to improve customer support with the Salesforce Service Cloud.

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