Innovator Industrial

 

Innovator Industrial builds a brighter future with custom apps, digitalized processes, and powerful insights.

Scorecards. Apps. Insights. Innovator Industrial is aptly named. The contracting company isn’t just transforming its own processes with digitalization; it’s transforming how heavy industry in Canada operates and responds to challenges and opportunities, such as climate change and the Internet of Things. “Our industry is on the cusp of great change – and we want to be leading the charge,” said Don Cooper, President and General Manager at Innovator Industrial.

Innovation Industrial is blazing a trail for digitalization in heavy industry.

Cooper has been breaking the mould since he founded the Alberta-based company in 2009. And his Trailblazing strategy has been a roaring success. In less than a decade, Innovator Industrial, which provides specialty services such as construction support, repair, maintenance, and inspection services to heavy industry, has grown from six to 90 employees.

For Cooper, this is just the beginning of a very bright future for Innovator Industrial. By embracing digitalization and analytics, he expects Innovator Industrial to expand 10-fold in the next 10 years. “At Innovator Industrial, every project, every decision, and every employee is supported by accurate data and digitalized processes,” said Cooper. “We have apps for just about everything.” And he really does mean everything.

Cooper has spearheaded the development of more than 100 apps on the Salesforce Platform to enrich and simplify a range of processes – from team optimization and meeting planning to training and project delivery. “It’s really quick and easy to spin up new functionality,” he explained. “Every new app that we deploy provides us with additional actionable data that we can exploit to optimize our business.”
 

With Salesforce, we can deliver greater value to our customers and unlock greater competitive advantage. It enables us to differentiate and grow our business, and blaze a trail in digitalization.”

Don Cooper, President and General Manager, Innovator Industrial

Intelligent analytics drive better safety behaviors.

For example, Cooper and his team have developed an app that helps to keep its workers safe at industrial sites. The app is founded on years’ worth of safety observations, which enables Innovator Industrial to provide a personalized best practice guide to workers based on the parameters of different projects.

Workers are encouraged to input safety observations and actions taken. “We can now track safety behaviors and issues across every customer site and every customer contract, which enables us to identify trends,” said Cooper. Based on this information, the team creates relevant safety content and reminders, which are pushed out via Salesforce.

Apps transform business processes and reveal new insights.

Combining the power of apps with smarter insights has already enabled Innovator Industrial to achieve great things. As well as boosting staff and customer satisfaction, it has reduced the average time for raising an invoice from 36 days to around 30 minutes and notched up a staggering sales win rate of 95%, on key large opportunities that the company opts to pursue.

“With Salesforce, we can deliver greater value to our customers and unlock greater competitive advantage. It enables us to differentiate and grow our business, and blaze a trail in digitalization,” said Cooper.

Centralized platform supports collaboration and growth.

From construction and engineering to maintenance and inspection services, Innovator Industrial delivers specialty services and expertise to heavy industry companies, such as oil producers and manufacturers, across Canada.

When Innovator Industrial first started out, tracking the sales pipeline between six people wasn’t a problem. But as the company began to grow, Cooper and his colleagues found it harder to follow every action on every lead. “We had a tremendous amount of undocumented customer interactions, and paper-based forms that just weren’t user friendly,” explained Cooper. “We needed to establish best practices that would enable us to scale.”

To capture this vital information and support its sales processes, Cooper turned to Salesforce. “We wanted a single source of truth; a platform for collaboration that would ensure every customer interaction was tracked,” said Cooper. And with Salesforce, that’s exactly what Cooper has achieved.

Dashboards provide greater cost control and transparency across customer engagements.

By combining Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Pardot with Force.com, Innovator Industrial can not only document every customer interaction, but also enrich every interaction. For example, its field services team use Service Cloud to manage every aspect of a customer contract, including the provisioning of labor, equipment, and materials (LEMS).

The allocation of these resources used to be tracked on paper LEM form pads, which were easily lost. By digitalizing data capture in the field, Innovator Industrial has not only improved billing accuracy but also cost transparency for customers. “With the Service Cloud dashboards, we can provide our customers with a real-time report on expenditure, which gives them much greater cost control,” added Cooper.

Sales teams achieve 95% win rate with scorecard.

Innovator Industrial has also boosted its chances of winning new customers by developing a best practice approach to sales founded on a unique scorecard and 28 key customer interactions. “We’ve developed a fool-proof algorithm that helps us sell more successfully and more efficiently,” said Cooper. “As long as we follow our scorecard system, we have a 95% win rate!”

The scorecard is powered by Sales Cloud, which also provides the team with a central platform for tracking their activities and results. “With Sales Cloud, we can identify trends and behaviors that help to refine our coaching and forecasting efforts,” explained Cooper. “We can even develop individual success plans based on a person’s specific sales skills.”

Personalized content and conversations nurture prospects.

Every successful sale starts with a strong lead. To maximize the potential of every prospect, Innovator Industrial produces a lot of online content to demonstrate its market and thought leadership. Developing great content is just the first step; the company’s marketing team also needs to ensure that it reaches the right people at the right time.

“With Pardot, we can create intelligent one-to-one journeys for prospects and target them with content that is relevant to their job role and sector,” said Cooper. “We track how prospects interact with different marketing collateral, which helps sales teams have more intelligent conversations further down the line.”

The marketing team at Innovator Industrial also use Pardot to simplify segmentation and lead scoring and to automate email campaigns and landing page updates.

New ideas unlock greater competitive advantage and productivity.

Cooper is always on the lookout for the next process that can be simplified, automated, or enriched. In fact, he’s developed an app that encourages everyone at Innovator Industrial to flag up on a daily basis something that has impacted their productivity – whether it’s a late delivery or a lack of information.

“The Impact app improves employee engagement as it demonstrates that we’re doing everything we can to make their jobs easier,” said Cooper. “The app also helps us unlock invaluable insights for our customers as we can share with them any issues we’ve encountered and offer advice.”

Every new idea strengthens Innovator Industrial’s status as a Trailblazer in a traditional industry that is ripe for disruption and digitalization. “With Salesforce, we’re pioneering a new approach that will transform our business, our customer relationships, and our sector,” said Cooper.

TRAILBLAZER SPOTLIGHT

“With Salesforce, I can solve a business problem with a new app in a matter of days, which boosts our competitive advantage and keeps us at the forefront of the sector.”
Don Cooper, President and General Manager at Innovator Industrial.
 

Keep exploring stories like this one.

Loading Loading in Progress

Questions? We’ll put you on the right path.

Ask about Salesforce products, pricing, implementation, or anything else. Our highly trained reps are standing by, ready to help.