Crossmark

PaaS Customer Story — Crossmark

CROSSMARK finds new ways to connect brands with consumers using Salesforce.

CROSSMARK

Professional Services

For more than a century, CROSSMARK has helped retail companies, from consumer packaged goods manufacturers to big-box retailers, reach consumers anywhere along the shopping journey from product discovery to purchase — what CROSSMARK calls “thought to bought.”

With the launch of CROSSMARK OneHub — its newest app built on the Salesforce platform — CROSSMARK has deployed a new and innovative way to connect retailers, suppliers, and shoppers more closely than ever.

Not so long ago, almost anyone could walk into a retail store and tell the staff they had been sent to set up an in-store display or stage an event. Store managers were often in the dark about whether these promotions had been authorised, so the entire process could be chaotic.

Increasingly, retailers wanted more control and visibility over their stores. Suppliers wanted more insights into the impact of their promotions. And CROSSMARK saw an opportunity to address both with a single app that could also open the door to new ways to connect with and understand consumers.

CROSSMARK OneHub, which launched in mid-2016, enables the selling, planning, execution, and measurement of in-store retail activities ranging from merchandising to reset and remodels to demonstrations and shopper engagement.

“A lot of companies claim to have a multi-tenant platform that is continually updated, but I have not seen a platform that matches Salesforce.”

“There are a lot of companies that claim to have a multitenant platform that is continually updated, but I have not seen a platform that matches Salesforce,” said Mike Anderson, CROSSMARK’s CIO. “When you combine that with Force.com and Heroku and the ability to integrate those two pieces, there’s not an application I can think of that you can’t build or extend using Salesforce.”

For retailers, the app offers unprecedented control over their stores and can be easily configured to their specific workflows and processes. A leading drugstore chain already has plans to put the app in the hands of thousands of store managers across the country, and other retailers are lining up to leverage CROSSMARK OneHub. By the end of 2017, Anderson projects CROSSMARK OneHub will boast up to 100,000 daily users.

For suppliers, CROSSMARK OneHub promises new insights into the effectiveness of promotions and events. By tapping into the point-of-sale data from the retailer, CROSSMARK can provide suppliers with rich data to measure the effectiveness of a specific promotion or event. Did sales of a particular product rise after an in-store event? Now a supplier can get the answer with a few clicks.

What makes CROSSMARK OneHub really exceptional is the way it leverages the full spectrum that Salesforce offers. This 100% native Salesforce application is the culmination of everything CROSSMARK has been doing with Salesforce since 2013. Built on Salesforce Salesforce Platform, CROSSMARK OneHub integrates Sales Cloud for forecasting, Service Cloud to enable incident/case management, and Communities to connect retailers and their suppliers. To handle the massive quantity of data generated daily, the IT team employed Heroku Postres and Heroku Connect – both Salesforce products – to ensure CROSSMARK OneHub could scale with ease.

“Salesforce has helped us become a more agile company,” he said. “It used to take weeks to come back with prototypes. Now with Salesforce, our developers can build a proof-of-concept the same day and get immediate feedback and faster iteration. At one point, we joked about moving to daily sprints due to how quickly we can develop.”