Salesforce Manufacturing CRM for Sales Optimization and Quote Management

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

Without a manufacturing CRM in place, on-site and field sales teams had to struggle with notes scattered across several outdated tools.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.

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.

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.