CBA Success Story

The Challenge:

• Craft Brewers Association (CBA) purchased 75 EE seats but was nominally using them
• Relied primarily on spreadsheets for information
• Opportunity object was disabled and dashboards not accurate
• Lack of comfort with the tool and no SFDC process established
• No tracking for pipeline, account inspection, or any Opportunity related activities
• Management and teams frustrated with adoption
• Forecasting done by the corporate office and passed down to the region by the regional sales managers

The Breakthrough:

• Opportunity object enabled and SFDC customized. CBA sales now able to use Opportunities to create and track pipeline
• CBA sales process was enabled in SFDC
• Sales makers can now go from Opportunity to Wholesaler Task leveraging SFDC Mobile
• CBA now leveraging SFDC for greater sales visibility
• Accurate Dashboards provide improved tracking and pipeline discussion
• Reps indicated that the repetition of the session’s Power Tips

Quotes:

  “I personally thought this was very useful over the last four weeks. My team, as you can see from the work they've done in opportunities, has advanced to a very comfortable level. I was really pleased by having it done this way.”
—Derek Hahm,
NW Regional
Sales Director

“Moving in the right direction. Much happier today than where they were a month ago.”
--Scott Urbatsch,
Director of IT

“Found it very beneficial and I'm glad we're going down the route of Opportunities.”
--Fred Stewart,
Key Accounts Manager
 

Metrics	30 days prior	Pilot impact	% Increase
Created Tasks	2299	3088	34%
Completed Tasks	2270	2787	23%
Logins	3831	4505	18%
Opportunities Created	0	271	2710%

Gateway to Success

“What Baker offers is a turnkey approach. It was custom-tailored for us, which accelerated the process,” explained O’Neill. “Our goal is to achieve net new sales. In this competitive marketplace, that’s not always just going to happen, because there are so many competitive forces in play; more resellers, more people in our business. It’s become a very challenging environment for us to work in.”

However, with salesforce.com adoption wired directly into the Unified Communications Breakaway Play, Baker Communications was able to engage Black Box in a CRM paradigm that effectively modified sales team behavior, leading even many seasoned, “farmer” salespeople to start achieving net new sales only seven weeks into the 12 week play.

O’Neill especially appreciates the way the play was completely organized from collateral to cadence, giving management the chance to have precise, timely, detailed information at a glance.

“We can see how we were progressing, not only on a weekly basis, but on a daily basis and in some cases an hourly basis,” said O’Neill. “Sometimes it energized people and in other cases it exposed people. It’s really been a wake-up call all the way across the board within our organization.”

Even with five weeks remaining in the play, Black Box has already undergone a significant transformation, one O’Neill intends to maintain. “I have people within my group who are coming up with variations of this play,” he said. “Some are specific to Cisco and some expand beyond it. We started out with 200 contacts for each of our 12 sales reps. Now, I have one guy that’s got 2100 contacts for another, and he is already devising and putting together MarCom for it.”
 

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