Standardized Sales Stages for Global Utility Provider

Closing sales faster with Salesforce

This global utility provider is part of a wider corporate family. The properties arm of the global organization delivers customized solutions to businesses looking to improve their buildings’ performance. Their customer is typically the property manager for offices, retail, banking, or retail sector.

The Problem

The properties division has successfully grown its services portfolio over the years, partly via the acquisition of relevant external divisions. When the team approached Endiem, six entities were operating under the properties umbrella. While all divisions were running on the same instance of Salesforce, their processes were vastly different.

For better visibility over the group, the leadership team came to Endiem with the challenge of harmonizing the critical business information into one central instance of Salesforce, rationalized in optimized, group-wide business processes.

The scope of the project was wide-ranging, but here at Endiem, we love a challenge! After carefully listening to the teams’ requirements and objectives, our recommendations were to break these enhancements down into four stages:-

1. Standardization of sales stages
2. Rationalization of contractor management
3. Improved quoting infrastructure
4. Enhanced revenue scheduling and forecasting.

Let’s take a look at stage one: Standardization of Salesforce Sales Stages.

While the full team was already working with Salesforce Opportunities to manage their complex sales through the different stages, there was a lack of uniformity when it came to processes.

There was no way to see and manage the whole sales pipeline by stage. Instead, the management team worked across separate dashboards and reports and then manually put the picture together for the entire group.

Moreover, it was not efficient and meant that our client was not getting the full benefit of their investment in a world-class sales platform. There had to be a better way.

The Solution

The great news was our client was recording all of the critical sales information in Salesforce. The solution lay in standardizing this information and flow.

Opportunity stages were agreed upon and rationalized across all divisions, with standard default probabilities put in place. Picklist values on fields were honed and restricted to ensure that the data the team entered allowed for meaningful reporting. Endiem carefully reassigned permission sets to keep things in check - no more on-the-fly changes!

Endiem ensured that all of the existing Opportunities in the pipeline updated correctly to the new stages with this infrastructure in place. They also assessed and updated historic validation rules and triggers to match the new process.

As a result of all of this work to standardize, Endiem could then create the analytics reports and dashboards in Salesforce that the properties management team needed to get complete oversight of their sales pipeline and process.

Finally, Endiem carried out the all-important Admin and User training, ensuring that now the shiny sales process was in place, everyone knew exactly how to use it!

The Results

• Increased deal velocity
• Better time-to-value on realizing opportunity revenue
• Hours saved via automation of BI: no more manual report compilation
• Visibility over full portfolio sales performance
• Accurate, real-time reports on all sales opportunities
• Improved data visualization via enhanced Salesforce dashboards

“The standardization of our sales stages has meant that we are now working as one team to take our customers from initial inquiry, right through to close. Whether that’s new business or a new opportunity with an existing client, we can make sure that the process is streamlined from the get-go. What’s more, with enhanced reports and dashboards, as a leadership team, we have the full picture, right where we need it in Salesforce.”

Director IT & Digital Applications