Category: Manufacturing

WFH? Invest in Salesforce

Successfully running a company from home requires the right culture, employees, procedures, and maybe most importantly, technology. Some businesses who haven’t invested in a cloud-computing software such as Salesforce have been having a hard time adjusting to working from home. Salesforce is a cloud-based software that provides customer relationship management (CRM) and a suite of apps that go along with sales, service, marketing automation, and more. Salesforce becomes your central location to store all your important data, accounts, and deals. With a newly designed mobile app, take work on the go and be just as productive as you were on your computer. This allows businesses to run their entire company within Salesforce, supporting all departments with real-time data.

Managing Your Sales Pipeline with Sales Cloud

Sales Cloud is a customer relationship platform (CRM) designed to support sales and marketing by bringing all your customer data into one central location. Leverage Sales Cloud to manage and automate day-to-day sales activities including lead assignments, quote generation, forecasting, Einstein Analytics, and more. Additionally, your sales staff will have full visibility into every deal, account, opportunity, customer, and lost deals. Sales Cloud workflows and task automation help you create tasks and a process to help speed up your sales cycle. When implemented correctly, Sales Cloud helps save you time and builds long-lasting customers.

Servicing Your Customers with Service Cloud

Service Cloud is a customer relationship service platform designed to help you manage customer support issues quicker and increase first-visit resolution. With historical data on every customer interaction, your team can personalize your service based on their problems and history. Additionally, Service Cloud offers a multitude of tools to help you meet the needs of your customers. Some extensions for Service Cloud include: Field Service Lightning (FSL), Knowledge Base, Web2Case, Email2Case, and Customer Analytics. When implemented correctly, Service Cloud can improve customer communication, enable team collaboration, and give you full visibility into the health of your customer base.

Automated Lead Nurturing with Pardot

Pardot is a marketing automation platform designed to help companies engage leads and customers, support sales with qualified leads, and grow relationships. According to Salesforce, “Customers have seen sales revenue increase by 34% and marketing effectiveness increase by 37%” with Pardot (Pardot.com). Pardot gives you the ability to personalize your customer’s journey wit automated campaigns, targeted messaging, and predictive intelligence. Additionally, design and create email templates, content, landing pages, and more inside of Pardot. If you would like to learn more about Pardot, please visit our blog.

A Complete 360-View for Manufacturers with Manufacturing Cloud

Manufacturing Cloud gives manufacturers full visibility into their entire business operations. Manufacturing Cloud extends benefits to all your partners to collaborate across the same forecast order and demand data in one single source of truth. New features such as sales agreements gives manufacturers insights into committed and actual order volumes, performance against the forecast, and other time-phased metrics. Forecasting gives manufactures the ability to take control of their business with smarter business decisions based on analytics. If you would like to learn more about Manufacturing Cloud, please read the blogs below:

Virtual Collaboration with Quip

Quip provides your team with a messaging collaboration platform that helps transform productivity and resolves issues faster. Provide your team with the ability to create, discuss, and work faster with real-time documents, spreadsheets, and data that connects inside of Salesforce. With full integration, your employees will no longer have to work together in multiple systems. Quip becomes your central location to collaborate with other employees on deals, documents, and more. Furthermore, Quip has a mobile app to view, update, and work on the road.

Maximize your Salesforce Investment

Since 2002, our Salesforce experience has benefited thousands of clients and projects. We understand how flexible the Salesforce platform is and how it supports every department in your business. The key to maximizing your Salesforce investment is to implementing the platform company-wide. If your business is struggling to work from home without a cloud-based technology, it’s time to invest in a technology like Salesforce.

Frustrated With Your Manufacturing Sampling Program?

Is your company struggling to find the benefits of a good manufacturing sampling or seeding program? Sampling programs allow your company to catch any discrepancies or feedback before your production is in full swing. Without a closed-loop strategy, your company might not be seeing the results you want or expected. Our sampling program helped Kensington™, a leader of desktop and mobile accessories, see a 7,000% increase in ROI.

Program Pain Points

Sampling programs can make or break your product’s success. Companies tend to write off sampling programs without realizing the benefits a good program can bring in terms of end-user sales and customer feedback. Here are some pain points Corrao Group has found for manufacturing companies managing their sampling programs:

    • Trouble communicating the value of the samples
    • Missed feedback opportunities from potential customers about your product
    • No ability to track distributed samples
    • Samples are not personalized to the end-user
    • Difficulty collecting customer feedback during their unboxing to usage phases
    • Lack of auto-escalation to resolution as issues arise

Corrao Group’s Solution

Kensington™ partnered with the Corrao Group to develop an automated way of managing sample units. After optimizing their Salesforce instance, Corrao Group helped develop and implement a closed-loop strategy that involved sampling out new products to new or existing customers. The sampling program would require a streamlined distribution strategy, tracking capabilities, hands-off reporting, and clear ROI. The white-glove experience would become known as “ProConcierge” and would involve Corrao Group creating and assisting in:

    • Creating buyer personas to identify and prioritize qualified candidates
    • Building a content map for supporting marketing collateral
    • Creating weekly survey emails for the sampling program
    • Packages carrying docking stations were tracked through Salesforce, and Pardot was connected to ensure that the appropriate feedback requests were automatically delivered weekly
    • Customizing Salesforce reports to provide visibility into the leads generated weekly
    • Standardizing Kensington™’s Salesforce process and implementing data requirements throughout their sales process

Salesforce Products Used

    • Sales Cloud
    • Pardot
    • Einstein Analytics

Other Products Used

    • Form Assembly

The hand-off process included the creation of step-by-step demonstration videos by the team at Corrao Group to assist with training as new users joined the ProConceirge team at Kensington™. In total, Kensington™ saw a 7,000% increase in ROI, $3M in influenced sales, and over 1,000 units shipped. To learn more about our assistance in ProConceirge, download our white paper.

Salesforce’s Manufacturing Cloud

Our Sampling/Seeding program is exclusively built, configured, and optimized for Salesforce’s Manufacturing Cloud Platform. Manufacturing Cloud extends benefits to all your partners to collaborate across the same forecast order and demand data in one single source of truth. A new era is emerging for manufacturing, and it allows manufacturers to have complete control over the ability to operate their business in a much more profitable point of view.

Salesforce’s new Manufacturing Cloud will allow customers and their partners to have company-wide visibility into all their business processes. We understand that optimizing your Salesforce starts with optimizing your business processes. We’ve worked with nearly 1,000 customers; implementing, customizing, and optimizing Salesforce and have been everyday power users ourselves since 2008. Corrao Group can help you maximize your investments in Salesforce and Manufacturing Cloud. For more information, please visit our Salesforce page.

The Importance of Manufacturing Cloud

The release of Manufacturing Cloud is a fantastic accomplishment for Salesforce. Manufacturing Cloud takes the current pain points of the industry and turns them into an experience that is flexible in reacting to the customer’s ever-changing demands. In this blog, we are going to share with you the importance of Salesforce’s latest release.

Forecasting

Salesforce knows that the manufacturing industry contains more than just customers. Suppliers, contractors, dealers, service technicians, distributors, and internal warehouse and factory all play a crucial role in the development of your product and the experiences of your customers. Manufacturing Cloud helps users collaborate in real-time across the ecosystem to ensure your forecasts are accurate and updates to your schedules are automatically communicated to warehouse and purchasing departments.

According to Salesforce, “Manufacturers need a clear understanding of all past shipments, current production plans, and future production forecasts.” Forecasting in Manufacturing Cloud is all about taking control and allowing flexible releases to your customers’ needs. Manufacturers often have very different sales and forecasting processes that your supply and chain teams must know when to deliver new items. Manufacturing Cloud gives users the upfront awareness of what you think you’re going to sell, and when you are going to sell it. Having critical insights into the timing of selling your product will make every part of your business sufficient.

Forecasting in Salesforce isn’t just about how you’re going to sell your product on your unique timeline. It’s about knowing how you need to staff your factory: Do I need a second shift, or can I get by with the first shift? Manufacturers always have absurd spikes where their employees are forced to work long hours to get their product out. Forecasting in Manufacturing Cloud gives manufacturers an overview of all their businesses, allowing them to take control and make smarter decisions.

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Partner Collaboration

Manufacturing Cloud extends benefits to all your partners to collaborate across the same forecast order and demand data in one single source of truth. For example, the Partner Community allows your vendors and partners to see and engage in real-time updates to your sales forecasts. Additionally, analytics will be tied directly to order data with additional information into the territory, customer, agreement, product line, or product performance. Improving inventory management allows manufacturers the chance to analyze their customer data, and gain insights into every product and territory performance.

A New Era

Manufacturers for far too long have used old proprietary systems that have never been scaled. In addition, these systems are not cloud friendly. Salesforce being able to tie manufacturing into the leader of the cloud is a big deal. The era of using and exporting spreadsheets or pivot tables is over. A new era is emerging for manufacturing, and it allows manufacturers to have complete control over the ability to operate their business in a much more profitable point of view.

Our experience with manufacturing dates back to our Managing Partner, Jack Corrao. Jack has developed numerous operational infrastructures to support hardware and software companies to deliver the best in breed solutions. As our #1 vertical, we are here to help you integrate and train you on best practices involving Manufacturing Cloud.

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be releasing a new blog related to Salesforce’s new Cloud. We’ll cover manufacturing pain points Salesforce solved, our favorite features, and how to integrate Manufacturing Cloud. If you would like to learn more, please contact us.

Sources

https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2019/09/introducing-manufacturing-cloud.html

All Photos can be found here: https://www.salesforce.com/products/manufacturing-cloud/overview/