USG Boral

Salesforce has enabled our sales teams to be more efficient by having real time customer data at their fingertips. It allows them to elevate the quality of customer engagements and gives them the data to make better business decisions.”

Dinesh Raju, CEO
 

USG Boral puts innovation first

A joint venture brought together Chicago-based USG’s cutting-edge product development technologies, with Boral Australia’s extensive manufacturing and distribution networks in the Asia/Pacific region. Now USG Boral has operations in 12 countries in Asia-Pacific and Middle East, as well as an export business to supply emerging markets in the region.

Cross-country collaboration within the organisation was one of the main challenges following the merger, so the company’s management team worked to connect the entire organisation on one platform.

“When we first merged the companies, each domestic team was operating independently as a separate business,” says Kevin B Miller, Vice President of Sales, USG Boral. “Teams across countries now connect on the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, and as a result they are each a part of the customer journey,” he says.

This connectivity lets the company efficiently roll out new innovations and share customer knowledge across regions. It’s a great way to level set, and it’s boosting productivity beyond measure. Teams have intuitively adopted a culture of sharing leads beyond borders, which happens at greater speed and with improved intelligence.

“Real time data is revolutionising the whole sales process,” says Miller. “For example, I could have a great relationship with a customer in Shanghai who also operates in five or six other countries. I use Salesforce to introduce the relevant sales teams in these other countries to my customer and thus turn a single interaction into an opportunity to deepen our relationship across regions.”

From reactive to proactive

Salesforce has also helped USG Boral evolve from a reactive organisation into a more strategic and proactive company with a full view of its sales pipeline.

Salesforce makes this possible by collecting and organising the intelligence built through customer interactions, which allows sales staff to track how leads are progressing through the pipeline.

“We can track the value of each project we are following, the speed it is progressing at from one stage to the next, and when we expect the project to start and material to ship. This gives us a much deeper view into our future business than in the past.” says John Lindsay, SVP Marketing, USG Boral

“As we build and track our project data we will begin to develop insights into our business – where we are having success, which product groups are performing well, which are below expectations, and which segments of the market are growing. All of this helps to inform our future strategy.” Lindsay says.

Cracking the code to growth

Miller has also seen the productivity of the company’s sales teams improve as sales reps embrace mobile working, using the Salesforce1 mobile app to work smarter for its customers. The result, is a 20 to 25 per cent decrease in the amount of administrative time a rep has to spend to manage his business. That means more time in front of their customers and more opportunities to close more work.

“We are using Salesforce data to help us identify the customers that present the best growth opportunities, and then developing strategies with those customers to support our growth ambitions,” says Miller. “This creates a roadmap for our reps to manage their businesses with, and sets a standard that our customers expect.”

For USG Boral, the key to growing in a competitive marketplace is the ability to operate as a single organisation across multiple markets. Salesforce is the engine USG Boral needed to make that happen.

 
 

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