The Problem
A thorough audit by Penrod revealed data, process, and organizational issues in our client’s Salesforce platform. These issues caused inefficient processes across the organization’s marketing, sales, and support teams.
Penrod grouped the issues into data, operational, organizational, and technical categories.
Poor Data Hygiene
The health of a Salesforce organization is highly dependent on data quality. In the case of our client, duplicate accounts, contacts, and leads had become the norm. All of these issues caused multiple problems.
First of all, the lack of automated match rules and input validation resulted in human errors during data entry. Furthermore, merging data structures from acquired businesses led to multiple record types, preventing users from cross-referencing accounts, leads, and contacts quickly. Single accounts often had unique records spread across two or three different types, complicating reporting, account management, and cross-selling efforts.
Inefficient Operations
The data hygiene issues mentioned further complicated lead, case, and contract management processes, leading to inefficient marketing, product, sales, and support operations. Manual processes, unorganized page layouts, unnecessary fields, and a lack of validation rules made basic operations challenging.
Poor Organization
Salesforce’s flexibility is one of its key advantages. The right partner can tailor an implementation to fit unique business processes. The efficiency of these processes creates a competitive advantage.
However, the previous implementation partner had not tailored our client’s Salesforce platform to its distinct business processes, notably how it manages accounts and assets. Our client oversees a large number of field assets and manages distributors with multiple locations. Unfortunately, the account and asset hierarchies were not structured to align with this model, resulting in inefficient processes and poor user experiences.
Technical Debt
Our client's Salesforce enhancement process was entirely ad-hoc. Support staff added features in response to individual requests rather than following a cohesive vision for the platform. These enhancements were often implemented without adhering to best practices, resulting in low adoption rates and disjointed processes that frequently went unused. As these enhancements piled up, particularly those built on legacy features, our client accumulated technical debt that impacted platform performance.
The Solution
Penrod leveraged the roadmap created during its Engage Advisory Services. They prioritized fixes on a structured roadmap, resulting in a platform tailored to our client's unique processes and business model built for the long term.
Penrod implemented the following:
Data Hygiene Enhancements
- Identified and removed duplicates with Cloudingo, a leading deduplication tool
- Introduced input validation that prevented users from entering bad data
Implemented automated rules that continuously prevent duplicates
- Created a unified data model across leads, contacts, opportunities, and accounts
Operational Enhancements
- Restructured layouts into user-friendly layouts that enhance data entry
- Created assignment rules that automate lead distribution and management
- Consolidated support-related processes to streamline case management
- Consolidated sales-related processes to simplify the selling process
- Automated marketing qualified lead thresholds
Organization Enhancements
- Implemented account hierarchies that made organizations with multiple locations easier to manage
- Introduced new partner types that allowed distributors to be managed according to their functional business role
- Implemented a new asset model that aligned with our client’s field inventory management strategy
- Created cross-relationships between leads, contacts, opportunities, and accounts for robust, actionable reporting
The Results
Penrod's Salesforce Managed Services helped our client transform Salesforce into an ideal platform tailored for its business model. Data hygiene improvements resulted in a unified data model, empowering cross-referencing, account management, and reporting capabilities.
Operational efficiencies were gained through automation, leading to improved lead and case management. An updated organizational structure provided better account management with complex hierarchies and distributor relationships. As a result of managed services, our client reduced its technical debt, improved user adoption, and achieved a more integrated, efficient system, supporting their mission in genomics with actionable insights and streamlined performance.
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