Pidilite forms new bonds with customers

Pidilite’s Industrial Products Division caters to the requirements of the B2B customers in more than 30 industries. Historically, the company managed customer engagement and sales processes through complicated project trackers and spread sheets. As the sales team grew,  there were challenges around key account management, opportunity pipeline visibility, optimising time spent and quality of engagement.

Pidilite realised the need to deploy a CRM tool and adopted Salesforce. The objective was to enable and automate sales processes and channel daily activities of the Sales, Business Development and Innovation team members towards a deeper and seamless customer engagement.

Today, all Sales, Business Development and Management Team members of Pidilite Industrial Products Division are using Sales Cloud to qualify leads, and prioritise and track activities around key accounts and opportunities on-the-go. On average, each rep is logging an average of two and a half activities a day which provides much more transparency around what’s happening out in the field.

Review processes structured through Sales Cloud have improved productivity and opportunity conversion rates. 

“The adoption of Salesforce has made a deep impact on how management reviews the business day-to-day. Access to quality data has enabled business improvement initiatives, shifting the focus of the review to sales force effectiveness and productivity,” says Rajesh B, CEO Industrial Products. 

Another key area which has significantly improved through the use of Salesforce is the management of new product trials and launch, with Pidilite using Salesforce Service Cloud to drive customer trials and report on the results. Insights on product performance at anchor accounts is critical for roll out and to ensure high success rate of innovation. Triggers ensure that reps are meeting with trial customers on a regular basis. Also, all trial data is captured in Salesforce and shared with reps so they can better understand how the products perform in different environments. The launch of products to customers is monitored carefully through all stages of execution.

“We are now able to seamlessly align the activities of the teams working on the innovation process to the outcome expected at the customer. Insights from trials recorded on Salesforce are carefully built into product design. Data on performance and value generated by the product is instantaneously available to the entire team to multiply success of innovation,” said Rajesh. “We have realised a significant increase in revenue from innovation projects, largely due to better visibility and management.” 

Today, Pidilite is adopting innovative methods for marketing products to consumers. It has a growing range of hobby products under the Fevicryl brand which also engages with influencers, teachers and others interested in crafts. It is an effective strategy as the influencers organise workshops to share their knowledge of Pidilite products and demonstrate them to consumers.

The only challenge was that, until recently, signing up influencers, organising workshops, and reimbursements was manual and involved lengthy processes. For Pidilite to grow its network of influencers, it needed to streamline onboarding and facilitate a speedy hassle-free workshop booking process. Using Heroku, it’s now built an app that does both.

The 'TEAM' app - a workshop management solution for Teachers - was built in just two and a half months and it is already saving hundreds of hours a month for everyone involved in the program. It has reduced the cycle time from 45 days to just five, and helped Pidilite to increase influencer-enrollments by around 10%.

“Influencer connect is a key component of our marketing programs,” said Kavita Jagtiani, Chief Marketing – Consumer Products Division. “The TEAM app has seamlessly integrated the touch points in our influencer connect program, driven efficiencies and solved real business problems of reach and impact. The app has also helped in further improving our engagement levels with the influencers.”

Pidilite is now planning to build a new app using Heroku and Service Cloud that will simplify the process of referring new consumer leads to contractors and dealers. The app will also be used to help manage multiple aspects of the influencer journey, including onboarding, loyalty, lead management and redemptions.

The company is also piloting a new collaborative working portal built on Lightning Platform. Leveraging analytics from Pidilite’s data warehouse and the capabilities of Salesforce, the portal automatically generates actions for business development managers and sales reps and helps them to collaborate on solving problems and addressing key business gaps.

“The portal and other initiatives we’ve delivered with Salesforce have brought a lot of automation and efficiency to sales. It makes everything simpler for us and our customers,” says Nevrekar.