ISME April 2018

SME Tech
improving accuracy and
accelerating timelines. With
lead management, data
cleansing, cross-company
collaboration and automated
contract management,
sales leaders can manage
processes easily.
Channel Partners – Key
to Maximising Growth
Having one portal for all
partners – distributors,
resellers, contractors,
wholesalers and retailers -
reduces channel conflict
and enhances visibility,
collaborative selling and
partner-deal registration. You
can thus scale your business
effectively.
With the advent of the Internet
of Things (IoT), Honeywell,
the heating industry pioneer,
was forced to change how it
sold, serviced and made its
products. Honeywell created a
line of connected thermostats
that lets customers manage
and monitor their homes’
temperature and energy
use from anywhere on their
smartphones or tablets.
The idea behind these IoT
devices was to connect them
to Honeywell’s vast networks
of independent contractors to
enable new business models,
increase revenue growth and
change the way customers
buy.
Salesforce Partner Community
and mobile app has enabled
a swarm of opportunities
for channel growth among
independent service
technicians. Every Honeywell
connected thermostat can
be connected back to a
contractor with the ‘find a
dealer’ button built into the
app. Contractors can see
real time data and a history
of customer interactions with
every device. Armed with
information from the app,
contractors can proactively
schedule maintenance, load
the right parts onto a truck,
train customers on how
to run their systems more
efficiently and find ways to
speed service and deepen
relationships.
With Salesforce making the
connections, these channel
partners provide a new level of
personalized service meeting
customer needs that is
unmatched in the industry.
Next Generation
Customer Price Quote
(CPQ) – Close More
Business
Products today are only
growing more complex.
Manufacturers need a
simple way to get around the
complexity and get orders
and configurations right
the first time around. More
spreadsheets, emails and
long approval cycles is not the
answer. It’s the right software
solution again to the rescue!
Mitsubishi Electric Cooling
& Heating, which makes
and sells residential and
commercial heating and
cooling equipment, had
sales reps wasting time
wading through hand-drawn
faxes, emailed PDFs, Excel
spreadsheets and paperwork
instead of chasing deals. The
results were costly – inventory
gaps, unpredictable revenues,
and loss of business
opportunities due to lengthy
sales cycles and quoting times.
A combination of Sales Cloud
Lightning, Partner Community
and Salesforce CPQ modernized
the sales process by making
everything available online and
available to use for distributors
as well as for the internal sales
team. They were able to respond
to projects faster and win more.
Using Salesforce Mitsubishi
Electric’s sales teams can now
see leads in the pipeline, work
together to convert them into
opportunities, and generate
accurate, up-to-the-minute
quotes within a single system.
Salesforce has given the company
a toolkit to improve profit and
loss management and inventory
planning while freeing reps from
the inefficiencies of quoting on
paper with file attachments.
In conclusion, successful
manufacturers today are the
ones thriving by going to
market faster, supercharging
team productivity, redefining
successful channel partnerships
and delivering the correct
products on time, every time.
And all this is enabled by
implementing a customer-first
CRM solution like Salesforce.
Author Credits
Souphien Akhrif,
Managing Director, Cloudworks
Intelligent SME | April 2018
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