Vashi Electricals plugs into digital transformation with Salesforce

Unlocking that growth potential while maintaining and building the company’s commitment to full-service customer assistance at scale is a significant challenge. However, Suraj is finding the solution in a digital transformation strategy with Salesforce at the core.

Initially working with a homegrown CRM tool, Suraj and his team turned to Salesforce for a more integrated solution with a 360-degree customer view.

“We persisted with our own CRM app for three to four years, but it needed to be upgraded all the time, and was often offline. We were spending more time on the app than on doing business, and business generation and opportunity conversion were uphill tasks,” he says.

“We needed a change. We wanted to work with the best in the industry, and while we looked at other vendors, Salesforce provides the 360-degree customer platform we needed, with maximum innovation and all functionality available at the click of a button.”

Suraj and his team are using Sales Cloud for end-to-end pipeline management, and Service Cloud predominantly as an email management tool. Pardot is also used for lead generation. 

“We don’t only use Sales Cloud as an opportunity conversion tool,” Suraj explains. “Our entire sales process is captured on Sales Cloud, from customer enquiry to collection. This gives our sales team one view of the entire sales process, rather than just looking at opportunities.”

Service Cloud is used to manage the approximately 2,000 new order or enquiry emails the company receives on a daily basis. Cases are created based on product line, then automatically assigned to the right brand team and integrated with Sales Cloud for follow-up.

“We use Pardot to run up-sell campaigns based on lead scoring to ensure we are reaching the right people,” says Suraj. “The integration between Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Pardot on a single platform gives all our team members a complete view of what is happening with any account.

“In practice, that means all the data and dashboards help our sales team to understand customers better. For example, salespeople know how much business we did with a given customer during the previous year, which product lines they purchased, any live opportunities they are interested in, and key prospects based on data from Pardot — all available on the same screen.”

Productivity has increased as salespeople across the company embrace this new way to work.

“There is a huge difference internally. Our salespeople can now identify which customers to focus on, and can therefore plan their days more productively,” he explains. “Sales team dependence on the back office has come down drastically.”

Suraj also points out that opportunity closure rates are up 10 per cent (from 20 to 30 per cent), and email response times have dropped significantly due to less time spent on manually assembling data from Excel spreadsheets.

“The Salesforce adoption rate among our salespeople is very high, with 90 per cent of our sales team using it every day,” he adds.

The next stop on the company’s digitalisation roadmap is a WhatsApp integration and bot-based interaction that aims to reduce customer dependency on salespeople. Combined with new Salesforce-led efficiencies, that will continue to improve customer outcomes.

“If my salespeople are more efficient and better informed, our customers automatically benefit,” Suraj concludes. “The level of customer consulting we now provide would not have been possible without a solution like this. Salesforce enables us to do business better and smarter.”