One of the most significant changes made was restructuring the sales team to become industry-focused instead of being divided by geographic territories. As the team continued to grow in headcount, they went through an adjustment period while they acclimated to approaching customer relationships from an account-management perspective. During this time, Luxor also introduced new versions of products, bringing in a higher volume of opportunities than they had experienced before. In turn, this created a large volume of opportunities that increased prospecting efforts.
The challenge
Between the new revenue goal, internal changes, and an uptick in business, sales management knew that if they were to succeed, they would need a system that supported the company’s growth. After years of enduring the challenges of working with a system that didn’t meet their needs, the Luxor team “finally threw their hands up”. It was time to replace it. Luxor needed a better system that sales could fully trust, that would align the sales team and unify the organization. The new sales strategy also called for more sophisticated tracking to capture metrics like customer outreach, engagement, attrition, and conversion metrics.
As they evaluated their specific requirements for defining their processes and enhancing their tools to support them, the sales team found more limitations to the old system than they had foreseen. They were not able to properly manage, process, and segment data as part of critical business processes and KPIs they were working to establish. There was also a lack of alignment with the IT team, which continued to strain the organization as it moved to adapt to the evolving needs of the sales and marketing teams.
Finally, Luxor began implementing marketing tactics to launch new products into the market. The existing system was not capable of properly managing the myriad marketing creatives and programs for key marketing initiatives. It was clear that to achieve the new targets, they needed a source of truth at the core of their business.
The solution
Luxor wanted to use Salesforce to align with the same technology that had been deployed in other EBSCO Industries companies and divisions. When they began selecting a Salesforce implementation partner, they were immediately comfortable with Silverline. In particular, the Luxor team felt that Silverline had become a trusted advisor during discovery meetings, providing industry best practices and asking questions that allowed open, honest dialogue. Luxor leaned on Silverline to develop a task force dedicated to facilitating this transformation. Through a team effort, Silverline and Luxor succeeded in implementing a robust CRM for sales to manage their channel partners.
The engagement examined each step of the sales process, from beginning conversations with a prospect to incorporating important details of a deal, such as pricing flows and RFP management working to reduce channel conflict.
Sales Cloud was first implemented, enabling a robust sales process for lead, account, and activity management. Sales could now identify every prospect and customer lead, enabling them to maximize all revenue opportunities. Management had visibility into the sales pipeline through a central dashboard that fueled timely decisions and actions. One especially positive change for management was receiving answers from staff on the fly regarding pipeline questions, which was an invaluable improvement with the new CRM.
The tangible results we’ve seen since working with Silverline speak for themselves. We’ve seen immediate return on investment, and they are our go-to partner on future projects.
Luxor could now manage multiple bids requested by different distributors for the same project and track the winning bid. Similarly, Luxor was enabled to manage multiple quotes and revisions, and track the final quotes. They were also provided a means of tracking new product launches to distributors.
In a parallel project stream, Silverline facilitated the implementation of Service Cloud with Luxor. This enabled the company to move away from managing product returns, claims, and warranties via spreadsheets, instead leveraging the efficiencies, data access, and integrated communications tools (like Chatter) within Service Cloud. This shared information stream allows the right people to take the appropriate action in a timely manner to support Luxor’s customers. Web-to-case functionality allows customers to quickly create cases through the Luxor website that trigger an automatic assignment of cases to support representatives. An approval process was put in place for warranties, including alerts to the support team handling claims.
Luxor also transitioned from Mailchimp to Pardot, another Salesforce application. Luxor had well-designed and strategized email campaigns sent regularly to customers and prospects, but a lack of metrics for the marketing and sales teams to evaluate campaign performance. They required engagement metrics that could support the organization’s emphasis on account-based marketing. This strategy is dependent on building out personal campaigns, based on a deep understanding of your customer. Pardot enabled these metrics, syncing the data from email campaigns programs to Salesforce, while allowing Luxor to maintain its creativity in design and messaging.
The Silverline team’s level of involvement in their projects was most impressive to Luxor. Silverline showed them how to get the most value out of their Salesforce investment by coaching them instead of telling them what to do. The depth of understanding about Luxor’s challenges could only have come from Silverline’s years of experience. They opened the door to approach them with any question at any time. Overall, they feel that they can continue to go to Silverline “at any time, even with just an idea”.
The result
Silverline and Luxor have done tremendous work together to enable real-time decision-making and agile management.
Increased access to data has transformed all aspects of its business operations. Luxor has become a data-driven organization, leveraging and understanding the enhanced reporting and metrics now available to them.
And while some team members were quicker than others to adopt, no one was left behind. The enablement training program empowered users who were slow to adopt so they could quickly onboard.
Looking towards the future
Luxor is well on its way to meet its 5-year plan. It has seen record growth and profit due to, in their own words, their “ability to be agile”.
The team has seen efficiency gains of an estimated 5.3 hours per user/per day by eliminating redundant tasks. The simple elimination of routine manual tasks, including the selection and routing of incoming emails, has made a significant difference to Luxor. The benefits of automated voicemail management, freight claims, reporting, and decreasing the number spreadsheets used has been felt throughout the organization.
An improvement that greatly stood out to them is doubling the response rate to customers. From an initial response time of one business day to less than 4 hours, this has drastically increased customer satisfaction.
The cost of the Salesforce implementation paid for itself within less than two years as a result of Luxor being able to better organize and track freight claims. Silverline’s work helped Luxor achieve their goals, and EBSCO continues to be a long-term client.