Ideal Standard uses Salesforce to unlock its €1.5 billion sales pipeline.

Ideal Standard has been living up to its name for more than 120 years, bringing design and performance together to deliver better bathrooms and washrooms across all sectors. Today, its global brand is appreciated in more than 100 countries.

All of Ideal Standard’s products are made by design, meaning that every element has been carefully considered so that it not only looks good, but has a clear purpose and long-lasting quality. At the same time, a focus on product performance means that the technology, expertise, and ingenuity behind every product and end solution make it all possible. Different environments need different washrooms and bathrooms – from homeowners to five-star hotel groups and property developers seeking high-end luxury, to offices, hospitals, and schools – Ideal Standard is the partner of choice for more and more professionals.

By providing a wide range of options to meet the precise needs of each project, coupled with forensic attention to detail, Ideal Standard builds long-lasting customer relationships. Now Salesforce Customer 360 is helping Ideal Standard move even closer to customers, utilising the power and insights from data to develop new, unique services to simplify the end-to-end journey and create better bathroom and washroom solutions across all sectors.

More than 80% of Ideal Standard’s revenue is B2B, providing complete bathroom and washroom solutions for large multiple installation projects.

“Our project business is the heart of Ideal Standard,” explained Jonathan Baillie, VP of Digital and Strategic Pricing. “But the company’s growth, across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, produced variations in the way local teams were specifying and delivering projects for customers, resulting in missed opportunities from not leveraging the transferability of best practices.”

Ideal Standard wanted to create a single, centralised global framework, but the company’s legacy CRM system was fragmented and varied between regions. As the market leader in CRM, Ideal Standard selected Salesforce and initially deployed Sales Cloud to build a global platform for its project business. Within four years of implementing Sales Cloud, Ideal Standard added Consumer Goods Cloud to manage the distribution and lifecycle of products in customer showrooms, Commerce Cloud to build a bathroom and washroom configurator, Singular™ Configurator, and plans to add Service Cloud and Revenue Cloud in the near term. Now, the business has united its international operations on a single platform, with the volume of its project business projected to increase by 40% in the process.

Ideal Standard’s sales process involves multiple touchpoints with numerous interconnected influencers and decision makers. All of these must be nurtured with information and services that put it in pole position to win the next project.

“We began our Salesforce journey with Sales Cloud to centralise activities and manage key accounts and our opportunity pipeline,” explained Aurelien Laroche, Group CRM Manager. “The visibility Sales Cloud gives us on customer activities and other stakeholders is delivering huge value.”

Laroche predicts that, as the data volume held in Sales Cloud grows, so will Ideal Standard’s ability to stay one step ahead of competitors, by orchestrating bespoke contact strategies and meeting the needs of stakeholders.

“Sales Cloud gives us priceless transparency and visibility into our projects,” said Baillie. “For the first time we have full visibility of our €1.5 billion pipeline at a touch of a button, how much is converting, our share of wallet, and the split by sector, which we track in Salesforce on a monthly basis, to see what’s working and where we can improve. As a result, we can improve resource allocation to areas that drive better value creation for our business, helping us to focus on activities that we know will make a bigger difference.

“For example, the hotel sector has been an area of renewed focus in the past year. Salesforce helped us with the information needed to reshape the way we organise teams and approach this market segment. Already we see improvement in our pipeline size and conversion.”

Ideal Standard has an international reputation for design and technology to deliver better washroom and bathroom solutions across all sectors. However, bathroom and washroom specification is a complex process with many considerations related to the design, compatibility, and installation of products; let alone the mandatory product norms and certifications required across different countries.

As one of the few players in the market with comprehensive cross-category and cross-sector expertise, Ideal Standard implemented Commerce Cloud to build Singular™ Configurator – an online configurator that guides users through the bathroom and washroom specification process. Benefitting from a library of more than 11,000 products, Singular™ Configurator helps piece together a complete specification solution, whether the project is a traditionally designed master bathroom for a residential dwelling or a large and modern, mixed-use high-rise development. All in one platform to make the process simple.

Commerce Cloud powers the company’s Singular™ Configurator. Registered users can manage all their projects in one place, collaborate on the specification, quickly build and customise a project from existing templates, and, when finished, download all the product information and assets needed for the project. This activity is recorded in Sales Cloud to feed the business development engine.

“Commerce Cloud integrates very well with our product information system (PIM), which holds the digital DNA and assets for our 11,000-product portfolio,” said Baillie. “Commerce Cloud also gives us the UX/UI freedom to build something that not only works well, but also looks fantastic. Together, this combination provides the user with a great experience during the specification process by intuitively guiding them to make the right choices and reduce the risk of selecting the wrong products or missing required ones.

“The seamless integration between Commerce Cloud and Sales Cloud is a powerful combination that we expect will increase our sales pipeline and improve our conversion rates significantly to grow our business by more than €200 million.”

Salesforce is also providing fuel for another growth engine in the company, with thousands of customer showrooms that display Ideal Standard products.

The company has been investing significantly to build up distribution in showrooms and ensure the brand is prominently positioned and well presented. To track the results, Ideal Standard has deployed Consumer Goods Cloud to capture an accurate picture of product inventory throughout the showroom network, its value, and its contribution to sales revenues.

“We have been underrepresented in showrooms in the past,” explained Baillie. “Now, with Consumer Goods Cloud we can see exactly where our products are and use that information to drive our showroom strategy. Where there are gaps in geographical locations or product offering, our field representatives work with the showroom to ensure we both maximise our sales potential.”

Consumer Goods Cloud will also help enhance the user journey on the Ideal Standard website. When customers see a collection, they can be guided to nearby showrooms to visit, see it in place, and talk to an advisor. With over one million visits to its website each year, just a 1% increase in showroom visits can produce 10,000 in person selling opportunities that might not otherwise occur.