Standardization of the sales process in Sodexo Polska

What did the customer gain from the Salesforce implementation?

The greatest advantage of implementing Salesforce is introducing a standardized and comprehensive sales process entirely carried out on the CRM Salesforce platform. It means better and full control over particular stages of offer acceptance; thus, finally, such an offer gains the status of a contract, and it’s transferred from CRM to the ERP system. Simultaneously integrating CRM with the HubSpot marketing tool, improved the cooperation between marketing and sales departments (lead flows), which increased the effectiveness of the sales process.

What is important is that the sales funnel is in line with the guidelines applicable in the entire Sodexo Group. Ensuring consistency with global standards was one of the leading project objectives.

Figure 1 – Implementation benefits

Challenge

There are three reasons behind Sodexo’s decision to implement Salesforce solution:

• Digitalization of the product offer, customer experience, and operational processes are Sodexo’s priority and a long-term business goal. As a market leader, Sodexo sets standards. And in the modern world, it’s difficult to speak of standards without including digitalization in the background. It applies to digital solutions that are visible for customers, such as virtual cards or e-Voucher, as well as solutions improving internal processes, for example, CRM or marketing automation tools that needed radical modifications.
• Focus on customer understood as the highest standard of customer service. But it is also adjusting the offer to customer needs as it would not be possible without complete knowledge about this customer from a single source and an analysis based on such collected knowledge. Salesforce solution precisely responds to these needs.
• Sales effectiveness can only be achieved when we care for our employees’ growth, support, motivation, and respect their work time inside an organization. It is challenging to discuss sales employees’ satisfaction and operational efficiency when filling the same data to different external systems. The best people deserve to work with the best solutions.

To better understand the challenge, the two essential and sales process-specific aspects need to be considered: segmentation and customer validation. A customer is automatically assigned in CRM to one of the segments based on defined criteria and verified against Anti-Money Laundering (AML). Especially this last-mentioned procedure has a significant impact on the validation results and is used to eliminate from the offering process unreliable parties.

From the very beginning, it was assumed that the organization of lead generating is necessary for the project’s success and its effects on sales results – starting from the stage of acquiring leads through the work of the marketing department to purchase. The implementation goal was also ensuring a tool for smooth cooperation between sales and marketing departments. The data collected by sales during customer interactions powers marketing (including marketing consents), and leads generated based on the data are passed to the other direction.

Solution

The implementation lasted for five months, which is in line with the established schedule. The schedule was crucial to begin a new fiscal year with a new CRM system. To execute the project, we selected two Salesforce portfolio modules: Sales Cloud and CPQ. Both tools support sales – Sales Cloud helps to organize and automate the process; CPQ facilitates managing product catalog and pricing offers. Additionally, we used our app available on AppExchange – Madocs. It is used to generate documents in PDF format.

Along with the customer’s Salesforce deployment, two separate integration projects were carried out. Although they were running independently, eventually launching Salesforce tools was closely related to them.

The first project was about the implementation of HubSpot – a platform to support marketing. After implementing it, integration with Salesforce CRM was performed. The second project concerned the ERP system – and here as well occurred and integration with Salesforce.

To better address customers’ needs, a few additional integrations supporting business processes were carried out. Some of the more important were Bisnode, with which information about a customer is always up-to-date, and integration with the Anti Money Laundering system, which we mentioned before.

Benefits

A new quality in the sales process, which is now quick, repetitive, and clear. The time from creating an offer to sending it after approval is significantly reduced. Offers are consistent for all sales representatives. Thanks to the acceptance process, the number of contracts that do not meet the business criteria decreased.

A dedicated integration with ERP allows the insight of crucial business information directly from the CRM window. It also ensures that the mechanism of creating contracts based on offers generated by CQP is reliable. It reduced the number of interactions with the back-office departments. All employees operate the same data, and they can focus on their tasks.

Transparent marketing and sales lead management process was established and implemented tool allow remaining its continuity: from the moment of acquiring a lead by marketing through passing it to sales, conversion, and offers.

Based on the number of offers and closed contracts, it is possible to establish sales goals and precisely report KPI’s results.

Currently, there are about 50 users of Salesforce tools. An important measure of the implementation success is a high level of new tools adoption by employees, especially sales representatives. Involving them in the project, mainly at the development stage, contributed to a large extent. Their suggestions and expectations were taken into account. Thanks to that, sales representatives and other employees received the tool ensuring a comfortable working environment and increasing productivity. And as the essential facility, sales reps list a mobile app, that is, online access (with the use of Single Sign-On – SSO; access to all resources with one-time logging in).

The positive project reception and its high evaluation among employees and the management team is also a result of meeting both the project’s completion date as well as budgetary arrangements.