Shull Media Partners leveraged multiple legacy systems and manual processes that resulted in numerous challenges for the company. Further, as the organization is growing, they wanted to minimize their tech stack and find a single, foundational system that could support many of the organization’s processes.
The challenges that Shull Media was facing included:
- management of Vendor and Client Accounts
- scheduling and submitting orders required various legacy systems
- generating and sending order confirmations and capturing electronic signature was a manual process
- the process of validating Vendor Invoices and invoice reconciliation took significant human intervention
- all of the systems were disparate and not connected – including QuickBooks Online and the organization’s operational systems
- lack of scalability with their current systems which is important as they continue to grow
In order to automate, streamline, and enhance Shull’s operational and financial processes, they decided to leverage Salesforce Sales Cloud and partner with SMBHD to implement the system.
Together, Shull and SMBHD leveraged the power of the Salesforce Platform to support the Sales and Order / Ad-buy and Financial processes. Leveraging Conga, a third-party document solution, Shull was able to generate order confirmations and acquire signatures for Ad-buys and Client orders.
To help minimize manual financial processes Shull and SMBHD leveraged custom Salesforce functionality to automatically receive, and process Vendor invoices sent as text files. Shull was able to generate Client Invoicing in Salesforce and subsequently reconcile the Vendor Invoices with the generated Client Invoices all within Salesforce. QuickBooks Online was integrated with Salesforce using Accord Sync to further streamline the organization’s financial processes, and Salesforce was leveraged to allow clients to conveniently pay their invoices online.
By implementing Salesforce Sales Cloud and leveraging the power of the Salesforce Platform and Accord Sync Shull was able to significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their media buying and finance processes.
RESULTS
Shull Media Partners faced multiple challenges in their media buying process before adopting Sales Cloud. These challenges included managing Vendor and Client Account details, scheduling orders through legacy systems, generating timely order confirmations and capturing signatures, validating and approving Vendor Invoices against Client Invoices, synchronizing invoice payments with QuickBooks, and measuring campaign tracking through a separate third-party system.
By eliminating the use of multiple systems to support their media buying process, Shull was able to cut down the overall time it takes to process and schedule orders. The team at SMBHD was able to eliminate redundant manual processes by leveraging automation to make the ordering process more efficient. The sales team can now dedicate more time engaging potential clients and keep current customers happy.
Vendor management and invoicing has also been streamlined in Salesforce. By utilizing the custom invoice handler and comparison tool, the Accounting team is now able to quickly identify discrepancies in billing and reconcile in a timely manner. Through the implementation of the payment portal page, Shull Media Partners is now seeing a quicker turnaround in invoice payments.
Accord Sync was implemented to synchronize financial data between Salesforce and QuickBooks, reducing duplicate data entry and ensuring real-time updates. Overall, by eliminating the use of multiple systems to accomplish key business processes, the team at Shull Media Partners can focus more time on growing their business and providing advertising and marketing solutions that will meet their customer’s needs.
