ARMS Reliability

We use to joke that a CRM was nothing more than a glorified phonebook. What Salesforce provides though is far more valuable and gives us a proper view of who each person is.”

John McIntosh | CIO
 

30%

Improvement in time to close sales

 

ARMS Reliability goes after new growth opportunity using Salesforce

ARMS Reliability works with some of the world’s largest resource, power and utility companies to ensure the reliability of assets throughout their lifecycle. It also offers asset strategy management to help customers transform how they manage assets to balance cost, risk and performance.

This latter offering brings together ARMS Reliability’s innovative technology, advisory services and decades of reliability engineering experience to provide customers with a step change in asset performance. It also presents a huge opportunity for growth.

“We’ve carved out a new niche for ourselves in asset strategy management in the last few years. It is where we see a lot of our future growth coming from and why we needed a solution like Salesforce to help us scale,” said Jo Quinn, Marketing Operations Manager.

Salesforce provides a single platform to run and scale the business

ARMS Reliability began using Sales Cloud more than ten years ago when it replaced an in-house CRM which was no longer effective and frequently crashed. Sales Cloud was initially used to maintain customer records but this changed as the company’s needs evolved.

"We were growing exponentially and wanted to connect everyone on one platform to manage sales, marketing, finance and engineering," said John McIntosh, Chief Information Officer at ARMS Reliability. “We also wanted to improve the experience for customers and employees by reducing the manual steps involved in moving from lead to opportunity to sale and build.”

To achieve this, ARMS Reliability first focused on simplifying their sales processes and using Sales Cloud to manage opportunities. It transitioned to Sales Cloud Lightning and adopted the Sales Console App to help sales reps surface and update customer records more easily. It also began using dashboards to track opportunities and identify trends like sales cycle length and the average number of opportunities per each deal won.

The efficiencies gained have helped each rep save up to 30 minutes per day on email and admin, and they’re able to sell smarter and faster. In fact, win rate has improved by 19% from 2011 to 2019 and time to close sales has reduced by 30% in the last four fiscal years.

ARMS Reliability has more recently switched on Einstein Activity Capture in Sales Cloud so that email communication related to leads and opportunities flows straight into Sales Cloud. It can then be analysed to score leads and guide reps to the next best action.

“It is so easy to spin up a dashboard on the fly that you almost forget how valuable they can be for decision makers. Additionally, working in an engineering company, everyone wants to see data validated and Einstein Activity Capture will help us a lot with that,” said McIntosh.

Transforming marketing with Pardot

Marketing is now also on the Salesforce platform after replacing its previous marketing automation tool with Pardot. This has reduced duplication and effort in managing customer contacts and brought sales and marketing teams into greater alignment. They can now track where leads are coming from and prioritise which should be followed up first. Also, lead nurturing is more efficient with campaigns developed by marketing and then personalised and deployed by sales.

ARMS Reliability is still optimising its use of Pardot, but has already run one of its most successful campaigns by leveraging tools like lead scoring and working with sales to ensure faster follow up.

“We’ve seen great results from Pardot in terms of the quality of leads we’re able to handover to sales and the amount of opportunity generated from those,” said Quinn. “We’re now starting to explore dynamic content to personalise our website experience and using Engagement Studio to continue to refine our nurture campaigns based on different regions and interests. As we expand our usage of Pardot, it’s exciting to access new capabilities and transform our marketing. Our most recent, successful demand generation campaign has delivered a 600% ROI. We’ve also seen deeper alignment between Marketing and Sales, achieving an average of 97% SLA compliance.”

Streamlining business for a better customer experience

ARMS Reliability has further streamlined its business by using several apps from the Salesforce AppExchange, including FinancialForce, Conga and DocuSign. These apps help improve productivity and service by removing manual admin surrounding processes like tracking time on projects and sending out new contracts. They also ensure that everyone in the business is working on one platform and collaborating around the same data to provide a better customer experience.

The use of Trailhead has helped McIntosh, Quinn and others in the company to learn what else is possible on Salesforce and build out these capabilities. It is now in the midst of implementing Salesforce CPQ to develop quotes and proposals with consistent terms, pricing and branding. This will stop people from working off old proposals and price lists and allow ARMS Reliability to automate the steps from proposal to invoicing, and ultimately streamline customer on-boarding.

Community Cloud is next on the list of priorities as ARMS Reliability embarks on a company-wide project to enhance the customer experience. It wants to introduce a portal to make technical support seamless and add in opportunities for collaboration later on.

“Now that all departments are on Salesforce we can get a holistic view of the customer and start to service them better. It also gives us a foundation to optimise everything we do and scale to reach our high growth targets,” said McIntosh.

 
 

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