Salesforce CRM deployment: Recalling our remarkable journey in implementing Salesforce.com CRM for a large manufacturing company
The Salesforce CRM deployments have made a significant impact to varied business verticals. Each time we work with a specific customer, we enable them and journey with them to achieve their business objectives. Recently, we were associated with a large manufacturing company, part of an Indian multinational, operating in various business lines. The company is planning to streamline its entire customer relationship management and automate sales and other business units. The stake holders wanted to align with critical sales data like sales pipeline, sales forecasting, and region specific sales. For implementation partners like us, a vital element is to understand the business domain of the customer, to ensure the customizations are met and architect a solution that addresses current business problems. An important question we always encounter is the distinction between vanilla customization and domain centric approach. It is compelling to understand the business domain of the customer, processes you can reengineer and show the true value proposition. In this case an important responsibility of sales team is to meet 100+ distributors and retailers on a recurring basis and gather intelligence on stock level for product lines, top deals in the pipe, fast moving products and information about the competitive products. Bodhtree’s domain centric solution and approach has simplified the complex business units into a simple business unit, which is transparent and visible in the entire gamut of sales automation, operations, distribution and product availability, distributor appointments and approving sales planning by respective managers. Defining rules and pre-defined criteria for critical needs has made a significant difference to the important approvals within a unit by the management. Our experience, by understanding the business domain of the customer, it is easy to architect a right solution that will simplify most complex processes. The right solution will be a strategic fit for the customer. Today it is not about customization alone; it is also about understanding the business domain of the customer. Another important lesson is we not only enable customers with just implementations, we need to journey with them and be part of their growth and success.