Viracon needed to improve sales productivity and internal transparency on process & individual performance, while securing their data from competitors within a shared environment.
At the beginning of the project, Viracon was using a combination of completely outdated technology (10+ years old) and spreadsheets to run their sales operations. As they were recently acquired by Apogee Enterprises with a stated strategic goal of “getting all of their business units onto one CRM platform and creating business synergies across the enterprise;” this arrangement was counter to the growth targets of both Viracon and Apogee.
Viracon needed a centralized and highly secure CRM platform from which to run their sales operations, this included:
- Corporate ownership had minimal insight into the sales process, creating missed sales and productivity opportunities for the entire organization.
- They had no mobile access to their CRM data, critical to their national sales team and contractors.
- The existing processes and technology were not scaling properly as it was heavily based on spreadsheets and the antiquated Viper CRM platform.
- Secure data was a priority for Viracon, as they would be living in a shared Salesforce organization with other Apogee business units; with some of these other business units being competitors.
- Viracon need the ability to track not just project contributors, but to track all parties involved; they referred to these 3rd parties as “Influencers”.
Overall, the organization needed a single solution that could integrate and optimize all the organization’s sales processes. In response to these challenges, Viracon partnered with SMBHD to create a new highly customize Sales Cloud application.
Leveraging Salesforce’s highly scalable Sales Cloud, SMBHD implemented a custom sales application that not only allowed for the traditional tracking of Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities; but also, the ability to track opportunity Influencers whether the opportunity was “Closed Won” or “Closed Lost”.
“SMBHD’s attention to this project and Viracon’s success was impeccable. I am their biggest fan.”
RESULTS
The project allowed Viracon to eliminate their legacy CRM system and move to the highly scalable Salesforce platform that allows them to integrate with other IT platforms they use, like Epicor, Egnyte, Outlook 365, and Viper. They also now have push-reports/dashboards available to all levels of their organization, from executive to key sales team members. Also, the entire team now has real-time mobile access to their CRM data, including Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Projects, and Contacts.
