Background

One of the world’s leading manufacturers of engineered products and services for infrastructure and irrigation equipment for agriculture, recognized on Fortune’s list of top 1000 American companies, the client reports sales of more than $3 billion annually.

Like any enterprise-level, publicly-traded company, their sales, and marketing teams are challenged with growing the business and returning profits to stakeholders. The company has done well at this over the years, but in an increasingly competitive global environment, it has never been more important to find ways to continue gaining market share.

Opportunity

That’s when the client turned to cloud technology and Salesforce for manufacturing to help connect their teams and manage the ever-growing challenge of big data. The structures division in particular wanted a sales CRM and marketing automation solution that could transform and modernize their sales and marketing efforts.

The solution would require deep integration so their sales, marketing and project teams across the world could share data that would enable them to handle quotes, purchase orders, contact information, and project updates more efficiently—and from one system.

Therefore, because of its customization and integration capabilities, Salesforce was chosen as the CRM and Pardot as the marketing automation tool for the client’s Structures division. Erik D., Marketing Director for the client’s Structures division, also liked the concept of a cloud-based system not requiring in-house applications, servers, and other infrastructure.

Solution

The team at Concentrix Catalyst was hired to assist the the client team with complex integrations that would connect data in disparate systems, including Oracle, with Salesforce. The near real-time integrations enabled their team to manage data such as quotes, proposals, purchase orders, and projects in other systems from Salesforce. Custom fields and objects also were created in Sales Cloud. And, the Catalyst team mobile-enabled the integrated system.

During the original Salesforce implementation in 2012, the team initially hit some common adoption roadblocks. Even though systems were integrated, the processes employees used and ways they entered data were different at each global location. The Catalyst team helped develop a strategy to overcome these data challenges to streamline the operation, as well as provide coaching on general adoption strategies.“Salesforce is dynamic, and it lives within a lot of other areas within an organization,” Erik said. “You have it living with the sales team. They’ve got their DNA. You have it living with the marketing team, they have their DNA.”Hiring a partner such as Catalyst enabled the client to identify and overcome Salesforce implementation and adoption challenges early so they could start achieving a strong ROI faster. Catalyst had expertise in using Salesforce for manufacturing, which made the process easier and more effective for the client.

“I can tell you, in our experience, marketing is probably now the safest cross-functional team within our division because of CRM Salesforce.com and Marketing Automation,” Erik said. “You need a very dynamic team that can understand your very specific need so we really needed a partner that could understand us and Catalyst does a good job. They use Salesforce. They use this tool. They live it. They breathe it.”

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