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Presto Stantest cemented gaps in its marketing strategy and boosted sales by adopting a SalesForce Sales Cloud solution.
By Heena Jhingan
There couldn’t be a situation worse than losing a customer data repository built over two years. This at a time when the organization in question was attempting to cope up with a sales reporting system that was heading toward redundancy. Presto Stantest, a manufacturer of testing instruments for various verticals, faced this scenario. It decided to start from scratch and go in for a Salesforce.com solution.
For the last four years, the company had been using a .NET solution. The process that the ten-member sales and service team followed was to pick random queries, which they thought were lucrative enough to be chased. The company soon realized that by taking this stance, it was losing touch with customers and, in a way, it was an injustice to the huge inquiry base that it had complied. The conversion ratios were poor, directly impacting sales in the bargain.
“The in house reporting solution that we had developed about four years back was incapable of handling the business needs of recent times and the future. It was not scalable and, above all, it was unreliable as it was sitting on the local server, which crashed, causing us a loss of database of two years. The volume of data lost may not have been large, but its value was immense. Also, since there was no structured reporting, this meant that there was no structured marketing strategy,” said Vishal Malhotra, Managing Director, Presto Stantest.
Presto Stantest started hunting for a complete solution so that it could get all of the data on to a single platform and gain control over inquiries and service delivery.
Malhotra said that the company was looking for a solution provider with whom it could partner rather than just buying a solution outright. At the same time, being an SME, it lacked a huge budget. After having deliberated on some solutions from Ramco and a couple of other vendors, Presto decided to implement the Salesforce.com solution with the help of SaaSForce, a local implementation partner of Salesforce.
The decision to move to the Cloud was a difficult one as there were concerns around data confidentiality and the price of the solution. “For us, price was a secondary consideration; the priority was to work with an experienced player and not a fly by night operator as we had learnt our lesson the hard way. We could not risk losing data yet another time. Besides, we were confident that the resulting sales increase would help us make up for the price that we were paying for the solution,” he reasoned.
Riding on the Cloud
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Presto is now leveraging a Cloud-based solution from Salesforce.com that has cut the dependence on staff to manage the reporting system. The solution included ten licenses for the sales and service staff to use. The company deployed the sales Cloud solution with some customization.
Malhotra said that minimal customization had been required. “We wanted the reporting to be done in a particular format. Also the customer data was customized to take care of asset tracking, case generation and quotations, providing higher visibility over orders, invoices and dispatch management,” he explained.
“Our executives can now capture customer information and instantly generate reports that include details about region- and vertical-wise demand of our solutions. Based on this, the executives plan their sales strategy, which has resulted in a higher conversion rate up from 10% to almost 25% today. Earlier we struggled with closing orders, discussing quotes, etc. However, with the new interface coming into play, we are able to complete the entire process within five days,” Malhotra stated.
With a structured process in place, Presto is now able to define targets and offer performance linked incentives to sales executives. A combination of these has helped Presto’s sales volumes go up by 25% within six months of the implementation.
Elaborating on the fact that customer satisfaction is critical for players like Presto, Malhotra pointed out that the best part of the implementation was the SMS gateway integration. Unlike earlier, when there was a higher probability of displeasing a customer due to delay in responding to his query, the new solution helps the system to automatically generate an SMS for all orders, quotes and service requests. In this way, the customer get an acknowledgment that his request has been received and he can also track action being taken on said request.
Interestingly, the solution has helped Presto improve its internal communications as well. As a part of the solution, the company is using Salesforce’s platform called Chatter that has helped make the resources at the company more transparent and collaborative. “Even the HR department is using this for some HR practices,” Malhotra informed.
Initial inertia
He said, like any other organization, Presto’s employees too took time to adapt to the new solution. “Initially, there was a period of human inertia; however, technically, we did not see any major stumbling blocks. The bigger challenges was tackle connectivity issues. Once we switched our service provider, things starting falling into place,” he recalled.
Upbeat about the benefits that Presto is reaping post implementation, the company now intends to integrate the SMS solution with other areas that require more alerts and triggers.
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