case study
How a healthware maker effectively implemented its sales strategy in Salesforce to accelerate sales growth
Overview
The company makes highly innovative wearable arm and leg sleeves that significantly reduce recovery times from sport or age related injuries and surgeries. It uses a dual sales system of penetrating distributors with an inside sales team, and then continuing to build sales through this distribution outlet using an account management team.
Key Challenge
While the CEO and VP of sales had put together a strategic growth plan and set up the right teams to execute, the company continued to struggle with limited visibility into how well the strategy was working.
Part of the problem was that their Salesforce instance was not customized the right way to support their sales strategy. Also, the team members had vastly different levels of Salesforce experience, and those that were uncomfortable using Salesforce rarely did so. This led to data fragmentation and data inconsistencies, further exacerbating visibility and reporting.
Furthermore, they lacked the internal skills to customize Salesforce to meet their increasingly complex needs in automations, integrations with various tools they used, data validation and maintenance, and advanced reporting and dashboards needs.
The VP of Sales reached out to us to see if we could help.
What We Did
We went on site, and over a two-day period, met with various stakeholders—the CEO, VP of Sales, various team leads from marketing, account management and training, as well as all the sales team members. We gathered not only requirements from various members, but also their viewpoints regarding what was currently working and not working on executing the sales strategy. We also reviewed their current Salesforce implementation, running reports to see usage patterns, data size and hygiene, as well as their current level of automation and data segmentation.
Next, we organized our findings and presented them to the management team, along with our recommendation—one of which was that they move to Enterprise Edition from their current Professional edition of Salesforce.
The VP of Sales gave us the go-ahead, and we implemented the following over a four-day period:
- Properly segmented their data according to their target customers at the lead, account, and opportunity levels.
- Added key fields they wanted to track on their reports and made sure these were mapped all the way for proper conversion.
- Built data validation to enforce required fields at the time they were required.
- Implemented their sales strategy into their opportunity stages using workflows and validation to enforce required fields to be completed.
- Added their products (600+) with multiple pricebooks for their different selling channels. These were enforced through automation and validation that reconciled record types with various elections and ensured that the right pricebook was used.
- Created workflows that automatically sent the key contact a link to the training/onboarding calendar when the opportunity was closed. This also changed the account type to customer account, and auto assigned to one of the account managers, notifying the to follow up with the key contact.
- Built reports and dashboards for leads by status and age; opportunities by status and age; closed sales by period and rep; forecasts for the quarter by rep and channel; changes in account sales over time; and several other reports and dashboards that both the CEO and VP of Sales were asking for in order to see how well they were executed on the strategy.
- Trained all team members on the general usage of Salesforce and on the specific workflows and layouts we built for their team’s needs. We did this over three 45 min sessions over three weeks to enable them to come back to us with questions as they used Salesforce.
- Continued to customize and adjust the current implementation over the next few weeks to ensure it was properly working for them.
Results
Because of the above changes we made, usage of Salesforce dramatically went up over the next two to three months. While most of the team members had used spreadsheets to track their data, the use of spreadsheets was completely eliminated within a month. The CEO and VP of Sales now relied on the dashboards to manage their company as nearly all of the sales and marketing data were in Salesforce.
More importantly, the company met its goal of increasing sales by 80% over the next 12 months—mostly because it had an amazing product, but also because the automations we built drove the account penetration targets they had set and knew would be key to hitting their desired growth rate.
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