Gulf Business Machines
Salesforce customer since 2016
65%
rise in sales pipeline
GBM prepares business’s digital transformation journey with Salesforce
Gulf Business Machines (GBM) lives up to its slogan: ‘preparing businesses for tomorrow’. As an end-to-end digital solutions provider, it combines great offerings with great people and partnerships. During the last three decades, it has helped hundreds of businesses and government institutions in the Persian Gulf, which includes Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, and Pakistan, transform their operations.
As a driving force for Digital Transformation, GBM has contributed to the economic transformation of the entire region, which has become an oasis of prosperity in the Middle East. “We have become the region’s leading technology company by helping our clients transform how they operate today to enable them to prepare for tomorrow,” said GBM Salesforce Specialist Sameer Jaffery. “We’ve nurtured partnerships with world-leading technology companies and invested in a skilled workforce that provides round-the-clock support.”
“With Salesforce, we have the capability to run deep analysis about our business and thus have better predictive insights.”
Innovation boosts competitive advantage
To maintain its market-leading status, GBM has embarked on its own transformation, which has already delivered a 40% increase in lead conversion and a 65% rise in its sales pipeline. “To stay number one, we need full transparency across our operations with information at our fingertips. We need to be fast, efficient, and agile,” said Jaffery.
GBM has been using Salesforce to help it achieve these goals for more than a decade, and in 2017 ramped up its capabilities with the deployment of Sales Cloud Lightning followed by Pardot and Quip. “Salesforce has driven our own transformation as a company, enabling us to be more proactive during the sales process and monitor performances in real time – it has been truly transformational,” said Jaffery.
GBM achieves greater sales success
Maximising efficiency and visibility across its 400-strong sales team is a key priority for GBM. “We take on huge transformation projects that require many interactions with customer contacts both during and after the sales cycle,” said Jaffery. “We need to ensure we are not running blind - emails and spreadsheets are not enough.” GBM also needs to ensure it can forecast its sales pipeline accurately in a changing marketplace.
Sales Cloud Lightning is at the heart of GBM’s sales operation, enabling it to plan more effectively and react more quickly. Jaffrey spent just a week touring GBM’s seven regional offices to train the sales teams. “Salesforce is so intuitive, the training requirement was minimal,” he explained. “People were surprised that they could do so much by just clicking a few buttons. The question was never ‘how do we use Salesforce?’ It was about how do we maximise adoption.” Around 85% of all deals are now completed on Salesforce and that number is rising all the time.
Delivering sharper marketing campaigns at a lower cost
The quoting process has been transformed by Sales Cloud Lightning, which gives sales teams visibility of all the client history and solution inventory information they need to respond to new business opportunities. With the Salesforce Mobile App, all this information can be accessed remotely, making the sales team more proactive and responsive. GBM’s management team also use the app to track the pipeline in real-time, which enables it to recognise the performance of sales teams.
Bringing lead nurturing and marketing in-house has helped to boost this performance as well as reduce marketing spend by 40%. “We used to rely on external parties to manage lead nurturing activities, such as email campaigns,” said Jaffrey. “With Pardot, we can now manage this in-house.”
As well as reducing costs, GBM has been able to unlock new insights. “We can use the information in Pardot to create more relevant campaigns that boost lead conversion,” added Jaffrey. “It has made our marketing more intelligent, proactive, and collaborative.” Local teams use Pardot to adapt content for different markets while still ensuring full visibility across the business.
New insights unlock new opportunities
With different team members and departments supporting different customer projects, collaboration is key. GBM uses Quip to simplify how its teams create and share key documents. For example, the legal department at HQ needs to collaborate with local teams on customer contracts, which can result in lots of emails. With Quip, legal advisors can now amend documents in real time. “We are still in the pilot phase, but Quip promises to have a huge impact on efficiency,” said Jaffery.
GBM is also exploring how it can use Tableau CRM to better forecast spikes in demand and allocate sufficient resources. “With Salesforce, we will be able to track trends and pre-empt what our customers need and when,” added Jaffery.
GBM has been so impressed with the benefits of the Salesforce platform that it is now offering the solution to its customers too. “Salesforce has transformed how we sell our solutions and extract value from our data. We now know a lot more about our customers,” said Jaffery.
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