Selling Successfully in Saudi with Salesforce.com

Challenge

• Inma Trading is a leading specialty trading house to the industrial sector in Saudi Arabia.  A subsidiary of Khalid Ali Alturki & Sons, the firm provides solutions in the areas of oil & gas, power solutions, specialty chemicals, and construction equipment
• To support the company’s sales and marketing functions, Inma Trading previously relied on separate BaaN and Crystal reports.  This prevented a defined outline of each customer relationship, no view into the pipeline, and a disproportionately high cost of supporting the silos of information
• Inma Trading operates in different geographies across Saudi Arabia and multiple product sets; the challenge was to draw all account information across the business together—cost effectively and quickly

Solution

• Chosen in preference to Microsoft CRM, Inma Trading deployed the salesforce.com Software as a Service (SaaS) model based on the low total cost of ownership, user friendliness, and speed of implementation (the roll-out was completed in three months)
• Salesforce is being used by 25 sales professionals in Saudi Arabia to support each of Inma Trading’s diversified operating subsidiaries.  Using Salesforce, the company has been able to quickly tailor its sales function to suit the varying demands of its customers; for example meeting the very different needs and purchase decisions of Power customers versus Timber customers
• Integration with the BaaN financial back office system means sales teams can review a customer’s financial situation; for example, they can view the customer’s credit limit prior to sending a quote
• Inma Trading is using customized reporting, analytics and dashboard functionality to effectively track and manage sales forecasts, pipelines, individual and regional sales targets, and other critical sales reports

Results

• Using Salesforce, Inma Trading now has a shared, umbrella view of its sales operations across all geographies and lines of business—nothing is lost or forgotten
• The company is able to identify and target resources towards growing, high margin lines of business—optimizing business development sales productivity
• The sales teams can now prepare for a sales meeting in a fraction of the time needed previously
• Sales managers can easily review and report on the performance of individual sales team members and account groups
• Decision making has been transformed using Salesforce—accurate, real-time decision-making is now a reality, based on a comprehensive view of each sales situation
• On the rare occasions staff leave the organization, the hand-over of customer information is significantly easier and the successor has comprehensive, immediate access to the customer relationship—all information is securely protected and shared in the cloud computing model