How Schneider Electric Creates Better Opportunities to Cross-Sell

From sensors and solar storage units to circuit breakers and vehicle charging points, Schneider Electric’s energy management and automation products are installed in millions of buildings around the world. These products can last years or even decades, which means sales teams must keep finding new ways to drive revenue.

With more than 20,000 salespeople worldwide, Schneider Electric needs to cross-sell and upsell to existing customers on a massive scale. The company, which operates in 100 countries, has been using Salesforce for 10+ years to optimise its processes and empower its teams. Around 15,000 salespeople visualise customer information and unlock new insights via Tableau CRM on a regular basis. But Schneider Electric wanted to take sales intelligence to the next level by transforming demand generation with digital technologies.

Trailblazers Sandor van den Brink, Digital Sales Experience Leader for Global Field Services, and Technical Architect Akila Subramanyam are part of the team that helped to deliver the new demand generation solution for field services. Here they share five strategies to help maximise success when digitalising and transforming sales processes.

1. Enable 360-degree visibility of customers to cross-sell and upsell

To best identify opportunities to cross-sell and upsell, salespeople need a real-time picture of a customer’s existing products. For Schneider Electric, this means tracking every asset at every customer site, but the scale of the company’s installed base makes this a massive challenge.

Thanks to its Demand Generation Suite, Schneider Electric has not only unlocked this business intelligence but also enabled its field services teams to take a more proactive approach to cross-selling and upselling across the installed base.

For example, sales teams can use Tableau CRM to identify products that might need replacing due to a lack of spare parts or service options.

“The sales teams can then work with customers to help eliminate those risks and prevent equipment failures that might impact both business continuity and operating costs,” explained Sandor. Since it started using Tableau CRM and Sales Cloud Discovery for Sales and Opportunity Insights to automate the capture and analysis of customer product data, Schneider Electric has been able to boost the visibility of its installed base.

As part of its Demand Generation Suite, Schneider Electric has also built an Account Cockpit on Tableau CRM and Sales Cloud, which provides sales teams with visibility of customer interactions, activities, and cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

2. Harness the power of AI to cross-sell at scale

Matching opportunities to cross-sell with the right campaigns can be a complex and time-consuming process – especially when it involves thousands of customer accounts. But not for Schneider Electric. It has created a Digital Opportunity Factory that can generate thousands of field services sales opportunities in less than 24 hours, all with just a few clicks.

Built on Tableau CRM and Sales Cloud, the Digital Opportunity Factory fast-tracks the identification of cross-sell and upsell opportunities linked to specific campaigns. “Using AI, we can automatically generate opportunities based on a range of criteria, such as installed products and countries, and assign them to the right salesperson according to their location and skillset,” said Sandor. Finding opportunities to cross-sell and upsell is often dependent on adding value. AI can surface these golden opportunities quickly and effectively.

Since the launch of the Demand Generation Suite at the end of 2019, the volume of field service opportunities being created digitally has increased x5, which has helped to boost the sales pipeline across the installed customer base. But it’s not just the quantity of opportunities that has improved; the quality of opportunities is better too.“Manually entering records or running a mass upload often results in errors. With the Digital Opportunity Factory, we can make the process more accurate and efficient,” said Sandor.

Schneider Electric has created an automated process, which is powered by Tableau CRM and Sales Cloud, to isolate any duplicate opportunities before they are assigned to a salesperson. It also uses Einstein Discovery to score each opportunity and make recommendations for the next best actions. To cross-sell and upsell effectively, getting maximum value from your data is key.

3. Stay in control of data quality and quantity

Schneider Electric is constantly enriching its customer insights, and that means it’s constantly growing its data volumes. With millions of records linked to installed products, Akila and her colleagues have become experts at managing large volumes of data in Salesforce. “It’s important to prioritise ingesting and visualising information that delivers the greatest value to your business users,” said Akila. “Tableau CRM should not become a data lake.”

To ensure information can be presented quickly to salespeople, Schneider Electric has optimised its approach to updating records. “Initially we were refreshing all our data every day, which was very time-consuming,” explained Akila. “By focusing just on critical data, we’ve reduced the original processing times by x4 and hope to make more improvements in the future.”

As well as managing vast data volumes, Schneider Electric has established processes to prevent dashboard sprawl. With thousands of people empowered to create dashboards in Tableau CRM on a self-service basis, it needs an easy way to track usage. “With Salesforce, we can identify which dashboards are being accessed and those that can be retired,” said Akila.

4. Demonstrate the value of digital sales tools

New solutions are only successful if they are embraced by their target audience. Schneider Electric has employed a variety of methods to maximise the adoption of its Demand Generation Suite within field services. “We engage with stakeholders at all levels and maintain momentum with regular communications,” explained Sandor. “We share short videos to educate users on different features and widgets within Tableau CRM and Sales Cloud nearly every week.”

As well as explaining the functionality of new digital sales tools, it’s important to showcase the potential benefits. “People need to know how a solution will save them time,” said Sandor. “Providing a simple experience and ensuring data accuracy helps to encourage adoption. If sales teams don’t trust a tool, they will stop using it.”

Schneider Electric updates its global Salesforce environment every couple of weeks, which means the team can keep enhancing the capabilities of the Demand Generation Suite to match business needs, cross-sell opportunities and market trends.

“AI is going to be key in the future; it will help to make sales processes more connected and predictive,” said Sandor. “As remote working continues, salespeople will increasingly want to use mobile devices and to share dashboards and data visualisations with their customers.”

5. Align sales opportunities with corporate values

Companies in every sector are increasingly aligning with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to help tackle global challenges, such as poverty, equality and climate change. As well as optimising its own operations for a low-carbon future, Schneider Electric wants to work with its customers to advance a more efficient, sustainable, resilient and inclusive world for all. The state of sales is increasingly value-driven, and it all starts with preparing the sales teams.

By empowering its sales teams with richer insights, Schneider Electric can identify opportunities to help customers reduce their energy consumption and environmental impact. As Sandor explained: “With Tableau CRM, we can see if a customer is using inefficient legacy products and explore how newer solutions could help them meet their sustainability targets and reduce their costs.”

For this strategy to be successful, Schneider Electric needs to be able to connect different sales teams across its products and services divisions. “With Tableau CRM and Sales Cloud, we can take a more holistic approach that supports our goal to empower everyone to make the most of the world’s energy and resources,” said Sandor.

Unlock more opportunities to cross-sell and upsell with AI

By harnessing AI insights and digital processes, businesses can take demand generation to a new level and unlock opportunities to cross-sell and upsell to their installed customer base. To see how AI can help turbocharge your sales teams to cross-sell, upsell and outsell the competition, check out the Sales Cloud demo.