Challenge

• Restoration Hardware, a leading purveyor of premium home furnishings, needed a CRM solution to support a new “To the Trade” business serving residential developers, the hospitality industry, commercial developers, architects, and interior designers.
• Restoration Hardware-Trade relied on an Excel-based system and paper-based customer files to manage its trade membership program and could not easily share or track customer information between the trade sales team, sales support team, trade customer service team and stores. 
• RH-Trade wanted a system to manage its customer information, manage its sales team, get customer-based reporting and communicate in targeted ways to the business’ different trade customer segments.
• Given RH-Trade was a start-up business, the company required a flexible, cost-effective solution that could easily be deployed and maintained.

Solution

• RH-Trade chose Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition for its cost-effectiveness, customizations, and ease of deployment. The company also liked that it could extend Salesforce CRM to support additional business processes.
• RH-Trade implemented Salesforce CRM in less than 10 weeks, with limited involvement from the company’s IT team.
• The team created a custom portal for retail associates in the U.S. and Canada, using Salesforce CRM’s Web-to-lead functionality to enable store teams to forward trade customer leads to the trade sales team in real-time.
• Using workflows, the company tracks customer-related tasks and activities, enabling the team to implement and follow standard processes.
• RH-Trade managers easily create reports to track key business metrics.

Results

• Restoration Hardware’s “To the Trade” team now has the infrastructure it needs to aggressively build its trade business and develop critical customer relationships.
• By providing a central repository for customer data, Salesforce CRM enables better collaboration plus lead and opportunity tracking. Salesforce CRM workflows help sales close deals more quickly.
• Deployment of an integrated retail portal ensures that trade customers are quickly connected with the right team to support them with their large trade projects. This formalized process ensures these customers no longer fall through the cracks and increases conversion rates.
• Leveraging Salesforce CRM’s reporting capabilities in conjunction with ExactTarget, RH-Trade can easily communicate in very targeted ways to different customer segments and measure the response and value of different marketing campaigns.
• RH-Trade plans to integrate Salesforce CRM with the company’s order management system to further streamline business processes. Integration with Outlook is also under consideration.