Coreshell’s team is revolutionizing big industries with Salesforce.

Coreshell believes in what Tan calls a strong customer discovery process. “We have assumptions about what our customers want, but we go out and test them and try to validate them,” he said. As a battery producer, Coreshell has the opportunity to work on a range of battery products including electric vehicles, renewable energy, and even consumer devices. Tracking all of its customer discussions across multiple industries was its first big test of Salesforce Essentials.

Tan tasked an intern to create a customized home page that lets him easily see which customers are interested in which types of products and in which markets. From there, Tan and his product team can quickly pinpoint key areas of development to focus on. “We want to satisfy the biggest market pool that we can,” he said.

An early-stage startup focused on materials research and development, Coreshell is now at the exciting moment of commercializing its technology. As its R&D progressed, the company started having in-depth conversations with key prospects — large organizations with lots of stakeholders. Tan quickly saw the need for a systematic way of tracking key stakeholders and planning how to get Coreshell’s story across to the right people at the right time.

Coreshell needed a solution capable of mapping out complex relationships across multiple threads of conversations, emails, and other touchpoints. “We’re nothing without the customer interactions we have,” Tan said. He needed an easily digestible way to track conversations with each company and stakeholder. And, he needed to enable his team to share their thoughts about which conversations needed nurturing and when. “Some prospects are really quick to pull the trigger on doing a demonstration with us, but others take a wait-and-see attitude,” Tan said. That process can take years and, the longer the cycle, the more conversations and relationships there are to keep tabs on.

• Coreshell’s business is built on integrating its innovative technology into the manufacturing lines of large-scale OEMs and partners
• A typical customer relationship can take years to move from introductions to demos to commercialization
• Within a single customer company, Coreshell regularly works with multiple stakeholders, each of whom often take weeks or months to gather feedback and advance the conversation
• Tracking interactions and nurturing relationships via automated check-in reminders topped Coreshell’s list of needs from a CRM solution

For all of the world-changing innovation they’re cranking out, Coreshell’s team is small — the company counts just eight full-time employees. In addition to his other duties as CEO, Tan counts himself as an integral part of the business development team — the company’s primary Salesforce users.

Tan’s Salesforce workflow starts with email integration. Every time he gets a new lead, it goes from email into Salesforce. As Tan put it, “That starts the relationship and the clock, and activates all of the built-in tools.” Email integration doesn’t stop with new leads, of course. Salesforce tracks everything flowing through the CEO’s inbox. “What I’ve really enjoyed is that, even though I’m having all these conversations, other people can come into Salesforce and follow along and provide another point of view or another way of analyzing the data that we collected going back to customer discovery,” he said. Valuable business information gleaned from Tan’s one-on-one conversations is moved into Salesforce, where it can be combed for insights and turned into strategies for moving forward.

Coreshell has developed a base of customers who are testing their battery coatings, spreading the word about what the technology can do, and informing next-gen battery designs. The goal now is to scale up Coreshell’s production to create larger quantities. As that happens, Tan expects to grow the team — which means more demands on their business technology. “As we continue expanding the team, I think Salesforce is going to be more and more important. It’ll be the hub where I can keep track of what sorts of conversations everyone is having, and use that as a way to bring us all together to discuss strategy,” he said. “We’re excited to explore how Salesforce can continue to help us scale, so that we can mature these relationships and get our product into our customers’ hands,” Tan said.

For Coreshell, the return on its Salesforce investment is best measured by how many relationships mature into paid agreements or demonstration projects. Customer growth counts for a lot, too, obviously, and in Q1 of 2021, Coreshell tripled its number of customers as compared to all of 2020. As Tan pointed out, that growth coincides with its Salesforce adoption. “I don’t want to say Salesforce is the only reason,” he said. “We’ve done a lot of great things in the company. But I will say that having Salesforce has really helped keep track of everything."