SunEdison Taps Salesforce Following Rapid Growth of Solar Energy Business

"Salesforce makes my job easy. The fact that we can wrap our hands around what was once an intimidating amount of data is a success in and of itself. Salesforce handles our 8,000 opportunities with ease—a sea change from the few hundred we struggled with on the old system. Our sustained business success in the face of tremendous growth is a testament to Salesforce's effectiveness."


Challenge
  • SunEdison, North America's leading solar energy service provider, required a CRM system to manage an influx of client activity in the wake of exponential business growth
  • A homegrown, rudimentary system caved under the weight of an enormous amount of account and opportunity data
  • The company sought a feature-rich solution that could be implemented with ease and produce reports on the fly
  • Because the company operates in a unique business niche within the energy sector, ease of customization was a must

Solution
  • SunEdison chose Salesforce over Siebel On Demand after an evaluation quickly uncovered Salesforce's potential (e.g., dashboards that graphically display key metrics for sales reps)
  • The company fully deployed Salesforce Professional Edition—with Microsoft Outlook integration—to 30 users in three months
  • With tips from salesforce.com's online help, SunEdison imported Excel-based customer data
  • The ability to customize fields and tabs easily aligns Salesforce with the way the company does business
  • Dashboards provide a "10,000-foot view" of the business with empty/full meters showing sales activities and progress at a glance; reports are quickly generated from dashboard metrics
  • With Salesforce,  the service group can create tickets when systems go down and—via s-controls—send email alerts to service people
  • A tailored Contracts tab allows the rebate group to record renewable energy credits accrued when the company sells solar power
  • SunEdison created and customized additional tabs such as Legal, D&E, and RFP specifically customized for its business

Results
  • The company went from a system that managed a few hundred opportunities to one that manages 8,000
  • Reports are created in a matter of minutes as opposed to hours
  • Users can drill into data and instantly run useful analyses
  • Information is graphically represented to help salespeople do their jobs more effectively
  • With complete visibility and control over its wealth of account and opportunity data, SunEdison is poised for continued success
 
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