Air Products Standardizes Sales Processes for More Accurate Forecasts with Salesforce

"With Salesforce, we've converged our sales processes and aligned our common corporate metrics across our multinational organization. The results have been impressive and—best of all—we've achieved our business goals at a reasonable cost.


Challenge
  • As a large multinational company, Air Products needed a single sales force automation system—rather than the mix of systems it used—to support its operations in over 60 countries
  • A leading manufacturer of industrial gases and specialty chemicals with $7.5 billion in annual sales, the company needed to align the activities of its ten distinct sales teams
  • The many divisions at Air Products lacked a common approach to managing the information critical to maintaining its relationships and growing revenue with customers

Solution
  • After evaluating products from a number of vendors, Air Products selected salesforce.com—including Salesforce, Salesforce Service & Support, and Force.com Builder—based on their low cost and flexibility in meeting complex technical and business requirements
  • The company used a small, focused team of four people to implement the salesforce.com solutions worldwide
  • Air Products created links to external databases so users can access sales revenue, competitive information, pricing tools, and other data easily from Salesforce

Results
  • With Salesforce, Air Products standardized its sales processes and created a single location where users around the world can access critical customer information
  • The company easily customized Salesforce to track and evaluate the use of its technical development resources so engineers and salespeople spend their time on the most profitable opportunities
  • Salesforce has provided Air Products insight into its sales processes so it can more accurately predict supply chain requirements
  • Future plans include an integration that will make data from the company's enterprise-wide SAP deployment available to Salesforce users
 
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