Numatic Iberia hoovers up more leads with Salesforce.

There’s nothing like that feeling when you find a product that just works. For millions of families in Britain, Henry is a household name. The iconic Numatic vacuum has been cleaning schools, offices, and homes for more than 50 years. And now, Henry’s taking on Iberia.

“Numatic Iberia is focused on growth in Spain and Portugal,” said Nuno Barata, CEO of the company. “Salesforce has been a game changer for our sales team, helping us to build more valuable relationships with our customers.”

With products that last decades, the challenge for Numatic Iberia is raising brand awareness and focusing on building long-term relationships with companies such as contract cleaners with more opportunities to cross- and up-sell.

Numatic Iberia is one of eight subsidiaries across the world. It operates a B2B and B2B2C business with a central team selling to retailers, wholesalers, and online. Larger customers include hospitals, offices, schools, and this market accounts for up to 70% of all sales.

With both one-off and recurrent customers, Numatic Iberia needed to define smarter processes to give both groups a seamless and valuable experience.

“It’s not efficient for the sales team to make calls for a one-off sale. With Salesforce we’ve got better visibility of the market and can track behaviour and engagement to identify which leads to nurture and which customers will prefer to come to us when they’re ready to buy,” explained Barata.

While the company has been using Salesforce since 2015, it decided to revamp the platform to optimize each area of the business, focusing first on sales, with services and marketing to follow in 2022.

Today, the sales team lives and breathes in Sales Cloud. “Salesforce is our single source of truth. If it didn’t happen in Salesforce, it didn’t happen at all,” confirmed Barata. “It was a shift in culture for the sales team, but after seeing how much easier life is, everyone loves working in Salesforce – so much so that they’re constantly coming to me with suggestions for new reports and features!”

Greater visibility of the pipeline has been a huge win for Numatic Iberia. In just a few clicks, the team can access dashboards to track the entire pipeline, which helps understand how actions today will impact sales figures further down the line.

This has been transformative for weekly sales meetings. “Five of us used to spend hours talking about opportunities, understanding what was happening, and making decisions on how best to proceed,” recalled Barata. “Now, we can get that level of understanding at a glance from our dashboards, and go into meetings prepared to take action and accelerate our goals.”

The team is also using Einstein to harness the power of artificial intelligence and keep the pipeline healthy. The solution scores up to 500 opportunities and generates an alert for any lead that the sales team has overlooked. Barata and his sales director can then look into whether an opportunity has been missed, or whether the lead is a slow burner.

“Sales people earn commission, so it can be tempting for them to go for low-hanging fruit rather than the longer, more valuable wins,” added Barata. “With Einstein, we can make sure we focus on the best opportunities without the team feeling like we’re breathing down their necks.”

It can also identify low quality leads that should be removed from the pipeline. Previously, this amounted to around 25% of opportunities, but with Einstein, that figure is down to between 6-8%, enabling the team to focus on more valuable opportunities.

As well as saving time, each rep can handle up to 100 leads, compared to 20-30 previously. “Salesforce automation does the heavy lifting so we can achieve greater velocity and work together to close deals faster,” said Barata.

With a lengthy sales cycle, the customer journey is split into two stages. Phase one is an education journey, and when the lead converts, a different team handles aftersales.

“Most B2B customers want to educate themselves and not be bothered by lots of sales calls, but when they do engage we can use Salesforce data to see which products they’re interested in based on browsing behaviour and tailor conversations to address their challenges,” Barata explained.

Salesforce insights also helped the company to adapt during the pandemic, when road shows were replaced by virtual demonstrations. Instead of visiting one prospect at a time, the team can present up to 150 people at once.

Attendees are invited based on events they’ve attended in the past and which marketing campaigns they’re signed up to. “Small wins add up to big efficiency gains. Being able to automate guest lists for demos saves us ten minutes of cross-referencing per person, which adds up when you have hundreds of attendees,” said Barata.

As the next step in the optimisation journey, Barata launched a pilot using High Velocity Sales. The solution helps to identify hot leads based on engagement with marketing campaigns. Instead of simply tracking email open rates, an integration with the solution expands the functionality and flags customers who have opened emails in a short space of time and routes those leads to the sales team.

In the future, Numatic Iberia also plans to track customer interests and behaviour on its website using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. This will then determine which trigger-based marketing campaigns they’re sent on, to ensure they’re targeted with the most relevant information.

When a customer converts, Service Cloud will centralise support across multiple channels and help agents to prioritise cases. “We’re keen to streamline the digital experience and use Salesforce to filter in-bound communications,” explains Barata. “We get lots of engagement on social media, so we need to separate the Henry fans, telling us he’s cute, from people needing advice from the support team.”

Numatic Iberia is a company that’s not afraid to face change, and Salesforce supports its growing business every step of the way.

“Salesforce is revolutionary. You can customise it, integrate it, and expand the functionality with AppExchange apps. We used Maps before the pandemic, and we know we’ll use it again in the future,” commented Barata. “It’s not just a great platform, Salesforce is the differentiator that makes our customers happy.”