Situation
- Company had acquired numerous smaller entities over the years and hadn’t optimized their sales processes and staff
- Manual process of inputting sales orders; sales representatives would email, or call in the order and schools would fax in orders
- Inaccurate orders due to mistyping or not hearing requirements correctly, or illegible handwriting from the fax
- Wanted the ability to bundle products that were complementary with each other
- Give visibility to sales representatives representing the different product lines into the accounts (public schools) as schools were getting contacted twice by multiple sales reps
- Give visibility to their customer base on the status of their order online
- Increase renewals by simplifying reorder process
- Assessed what systems and underlying architecture would best solve their problem, leveraging JD Edwards, Salesforce, or custom development, and also assessed gaps within their sales process
- Recommended migrating sales orders leveraging Salesforce and a 3rd party add on to be the order management system and implemented recommendation
- Streamlined sales processes and created workflows in Salesforce to force sales reps to adhere to the new processes
- Built an integration suite to integrate sales orders entered in Salesforce and pushed out to their JD Edwards and fulfillment applications
Solution
Benefits
- Reduced call volume to the call center by more than half for sales orders for either new orders or the status of an order
- Increased accuracy of orders to 99%
- Provided more visibility to sales representatives on activity on an account
- Leadership had more visibility into their sales pipeline
- School online orders increased especially in renewals