Enfo
“We’ve got a really good platform that enables many things for us – it’s become a foundation for our profitability. In addition, this journey has provided us with a big business opportunity as part of the Salesforce ecosystem - which is huge.”
How Enfo transformed its business model to data-driven – in just two years.
Enfo is a Nordic IT service company that enables data-driven business transformation for customers across Finland and Sweden. It employs some1000 specialists, who span a huge range of capabilities including hybrid platforms (data centers, public and private clouds), data management and integration, data-driven digital services and customer support.
Today, the company operates like a well-oiled machine, with turnover 121,5 MEUR during 2019, and a game-changing approach to service that’s helping customers achieve not just efficiency gains and cost savings – but entirely new business models.
However, things weren’t always so smooth for Enfo. In fact, as recently as 2017, Enfo faced a business challenge that threatened to undermine its own offering: how it was operating internally was completely out of sync with the model it was trying to enable for its customers.
The problem was one of scale: Enfo had just undergone a number of acquisitions, which had resulted in a bunch of siloed cultures, approaches and technologies. Even the newly consolidated Sales side of the business had no less than seven different CRMs in play. The business urgently needed unity across its various functions – in keeping with the core of its customer offering – but uniting as many as seven conflicting systems in a short timeframe? It was a tall order.
Stage one of Enfo’s transformation: getting Sales in sync
By late 2017, Enfo’s siloed CRMs were causing serious problems – its specialists could be working with the same customer across multiple areas of the business without even knowing it.
That wasn’t just bad news for Enfo, it meant Enfo’s customers weren’t getting the benefits of having their needs communicated and shared across the rest of the business – data that would inevitably help them have more productive conversations, and get more tailored solutions from Enfo’s specialists.
It was at this time that Tomi Koskinen, Senior Vice President of Business Applications at Enfo, joined a core team tasked with transforming Enfo’s Sales function for the better. Immediately, the team realized that having one integrated CRM at Enfo was the only solution – but which one?
Well, first, he says, they needed to make sure they chose a cloud-based CRM – not only because Enfo’s own core competencies revolved around cloud, but because, “We wanted our salespeople to have the flexibility of accessing the CRM data from anywhere, on any device.”
They also wanted a CRM that made the integration phase easy – otherwise, synthesizing seven different data streams could easily become an uphill, expensive battle.
In the end, Enfo decided on a pilot initiative with Sales Cloud – a decision that changed everything...
The implementation phase took just six months, including end-to-end data migration from Enfo’s legacy CRMs, and the building of a unique opportunity management process that could be run within Sales Cloud. By 2018, Enfo’s seven siloed systems were integrated.
In Tomi’s words, “We’ve been able to pull a huge, customer-facing organization under one system, providing transparency to sales operations.” All in just six months.
Stage two: transforming sales from push to pull and enabling profitability tracking by matching competence demand with supply
Once Enfo’s multiple CRMs were integrated into one, their Sales teams finally had the visibility they needed to provide the best possible experience for each customer – for example, by sharing each customer’s needs across the business so they could be factored into every conversation going forwards.
But there was still work to be done. In fact, there were two huge, critical issues Tomi and his teams needed to solve: “We were still lacking fundamental things,” he says. “For example, we had no way of managing our utilization forecast, and we didn’t have a clue about customer profitability forecasting. When you manage a professional services firm, and your whole profitability is based on your utilization and customer margin – it’s pretty important that you’re good at managing those things.”
Second, in order to build a foundation for profitable growth and to enable targeted IPO readiness, Enfo needed to provide an audit trail and full transparency to the company’s key business drivers affecting the profit and loss statement.
It would be too complex to try and solve these issues manually in house – especially given Enfo was already trying to transform its Sales operation as quickly as possible. So instead, Tomi opted for Salesforce CPQ – a solution he now calls Enfo’s “Silver bullet: one that has allowed us to both design and implement a portfolio of competencies that links to our commercial portfolio.”
He says, “Whenever Sales is selling something, we’re able to translate that to competence demand, and then match that to our competence supply. When we then balance that, we can manage our utilization and recruitment based on actual market needs. We can also use the information in developing our individuals to master expertise that is relevant in the market now and in the future. At the same time, when we have a product portfolio, we are able to see a profitability forecast based on our pipeline.”
Enfo is now experiencing a 5% improvement in deal margin thanks to a tool they recently implemented in CPQ. And where they’ve been able to capture the competence demand in the market, they’ve increased utilization by 2%. They’ve also been able to constantly recruit more expertise based on market needs. Both fantastic outcomes.
But these haven’t been the only benefits of CPQ for Enfo. On top of the Sales Cloud benefits, Enfo has seen improvements across the board from boosted collaboration between sales and delivery, increased cross-selling and deal size, and ability to process far more opportunities than before. All in all, with these fantastic outcomes Enfo has seen a significant return on investment in just a 12-month period.
Stage three: turning the Salesforce experience into a business opportunity
Enfo’s CPQ implementation was conducted together with Salesforce’s Customer Success group, who delivered a key insight to Tomi that transformed Enfo’s customer offering for good.
They knew that in the Nordic market there was an extremely high demand for CPQ consultants. So they advised Tomi to take all the learnings from Enfo’s own CPQ implementation, and turn those into a core competency that Enfo’s in-house specialists could offer their own customers.
...So he did. And, “Today, we have a team that was built during the implementation, which is now capable of providing Salesforce consultancy in the Nordic market. We’re partners with Salesforce and have grown a team of multi-certified Salesforce consultants – in fact, we’re just celebrating our first anniversary.”
Stage four: from co-creational sales to efficient service production
[Quotation: “In order to have sustainable competitive advantage, in a knowledge-intensive business, you need to have co-creation in your ecosystem. It is neither the strongest nor the most intelligent company that survives – it is the company that is the most responsive to change.” Seppo Kuula, CEO at Enfo]
From 2017 to 2018, Tomi and his teams were almost entirely focused on problem solving. It was all about getting Enfo’s siloed CRMs talking, and bringing Enfo’s competencies up to scratch with what customers were demanding.
Today is a very different story. Now that its Sales function is running smoothly, business is focused around providing co-creational services to customers. In Seppo’s words, that means “Aligning our sales and business areas in order to deliver our value promise to the customers.” A key enabler in achieving that vision is Salesforce technology. Tomi says, “Going forwards, each of our salespeople should be like a service designer in the solution sales– with Salesforce CPQ providing the components they need.”
Another key feature of Enfo’s new co-creative initiative will be AI. Enfo currently uses Salesforce Einstein for things like scoring opportunities and getting deeper insights into their CRM data – but for Tomi, the potential of Einstein will really start to show when they can apply it to the CRM data they generate over a longer timeframe. That way, they’ll be able to get deep, holistic, long-term insights into their customer relationships at all stages of the sales cycle, that’ll help them design even better solutions and customer journeys in the future.
In Tomi’s words, “We see a lot of areas where we can improve using Einstein. And of course, as a technology company, it’s cool to be a trailblazer and have an AI-enhanced CRM.
Stage five: becoming resilient in the face of volatility
Of course, possibly the greatest crisis Tomi and his teams have recently had to grapple with is Covid-19. For a company focused on building close, personal relationships with its customers, lockdown and other social distancing measures have made things a little complicated to say the least.
However, one ‘game changer’ Tomi attributes to helping the company survive this volatile, unpredictable time is also CPQ. He says, “We now have a foundation where we can manage our profitability, from utilization to the demand and supply of competencies. This has been a game changer for us in being able to survive on black numbers this spring.”
What’s next?Tomi and his teams have big plans for the future. The measures they’ve implemented with Salesforce have already generated significant ROI in a 12 month period – but there’s still appetite for improvement.
“We want to continuously improve – for example, we want to integrate Salesforce more tightly with our back office, for things like invoicing, finance and building apps. Now we have the ability to match competence demand with competence supply, we want to establish Salesforce as our order management tool.”
“We also see a possibility to widen our Salesforce usage by looking into Salesforce Pardot, so everything is in the same platform – our customer master data, product master data, price lists and so on. If we can provide that data to our salespeople earlier, seeing how contacts interact with our landing pages, and how they attend our seminars, and so forth, it’ll give us the possibility to have a much more valuable dialogue with them and in the end provide more personal and enhanced customer experience.”
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