Building a Bespoke, Centralised Sales Solution for a Coding and Labelling Specialist

A leading coding and labelling organisation engaged Bluewave to build a centralised B2B Sales tool to provide more accurate and consistent quotes for their customers.

Find out more about this custom-built, Salesforce-powered digital transformation below.

About the Customer

Our customer is a leader in producing coding and labelling solutions to meet the needs of factories across the UK. The organisation manufactures printers that print out sell-by and use-by dates onto perishables, food items, and transportable packaging. The business is a vital part of the production line for a lot of organisations within the food and beverage industry. The organisation’s coders provide date, barcode, and batch coding solutions for products and packaging, both primary and secondary, across a wide range of manufacturing industries.

The Challenge

As part of their process with customers, our client’s salesperson would analyse the customer’s production line and choose exactly what type of printer (wet ink vs laser, right hand side or left printing, etc) was required, as well as the length of power cables needed to plug it into the closest power source, the type of wiring, and many other factors. All of this information would be noted down in a spreadsheet and manually priced up. Once their customer had signed off, a fitter would go in and attempt to install the order, however, several mistakes were being made: incorrect type of printer, wrong size, wires aren’t long enough to reach the power source, etc. The installation would then be paused, and a replacement would have to be brought in. These errors were slowing down production and negatively affecting relationships with our client’s customers.

The business approached Bluewave for the provision of a centralised B2B Sales tool for the external sales team to improve relationship management, activities, quoting and reporting functionalities. The customer was looking for something that would ensure that Salesforce can exchange Sales data with their on premise SAP solution. Our client wanted to move away from de-centralised spreadsheets, with no version control of pricing, and provision a tool that guides sales reps to produce accurate and consistent quotes for customers, every time.

The Solution

Bluewave’s custom-build solution was designed specifically for the organisation’s needs. It included CPQ functionality to allow for product dependencies, discounts, approvals and bundles, as well as integration with SAP Business One, used to import accounts, contacts and pricing tables, as well as sending ‘Closed Won Opportunities’ (Agreed Quotations) to SAP. The solution also included the configuration of a custom Sales Cloud deployment, which would follow sales from lead to order, as well as the implementation of one-quote output documents, mobile access to Salesforce, Salesforce Configure Price Quote (CPQ), and all related data, as well as a Conga configuration.

The Process

The first part of this build featured a Sales Cloud implementation to handle campaigns, opportunities, and forecasting for the customer. The more complicated aspect of this build was the CPQ configuration which was implemented to replace manual processes and reduce human error. Our experts devised a system that would prevent our client’s sales team from having the ability to pick any incorrect components in the first place, taking every small nuance into account. Our new system would make it impossible for a salesperson to order a printer in the same bundle as a wire cable that couldn’t fit into it, for example. Our experts began this process by picking the most complex bundle – made up of 50-60 products – and putting them in a matrix with numerous build configurations. All of the organisation’s products had to be uploaded; all cables, parts, brackets, etc. – it all went into CPQ, providing countless different bundles.

Our customer’s pricing model was also factored into this build. Previously, the organisation’s sales execs were referring to spreadsheets, and pricing was not always correct or in-date. The new platform would provide accurate pricing that was updated consistently, across the system, rather than in saved documents that each individual salesperson had. Layered on top of the process we built to handle the product bundles themselves, our experts also had to look at discounts and customer pricing bands. To achieve this, the printers, accessories, and replacement packs were all put into product packs that had a combination of discounts: gold, silver, and bronze customer discounts. Within those, there were additional price bands, from A to F, and in some cases, beyond. Therefore our consultants had to create a complex lookup for each product pack. For each quote, our experts had to look what band each customer was in, and what price band, to be able to create an accurate quote. The quotes would then be downloaded as a pdf and automatically emailed to the customer to sign off.

Following this complex build, a salesperson would go into the new Salesforce-powered system, choose their options, and because that configuration is known to be correct, our client could now be completely confident that the install on the day would be successful.

“Essentially, we put together some very complicated aspects, to make things very easy for the customer. It took us a while, and there was a lot to consider, but ultimately this complex job was executed perfectly, and will never fail. Going forward, the process of ordering printers and parts is easy and seamless, with no human error.” – Senior Salesforce Developer at Bluewave

The Bluewave Way

The Bluewave Way is our agile implementation process, which has led to the delivery of over 250 successful Salesforce projects and engagements over the last decade, with this customer now counted amongst them. We worked both remotely and on-site, hand in hand with the organisation’s technical team, sales team, and senior stakeholders. Additionally, to ensure that user adoption went seamlessly, our experts provided admin training to all salespeople at the business, helping their execs to embrace the Salesforce platform.

“We are encouraged by the communication and agile way of working that Bluewave’s experts embraced. The results and feedback to date have been great. We have a lot to get used to, but the fact that we were able to go live with no major problems on our end was a great achievement, and a testament to Bluewave’s solution development expertise.” – Technical Project Lead at our Customer’s Organisation

The Results

The resulting solution includes end-to-end synchronisation between the Salesforce platform and SAP, as well as consistent delivery of standardised quotes, using up-to-date product and pricing details from SAP, as well as full visibility over all opportunities, using the forecasting feature of Salesforce. This provides full insight into why opportunities are won or lost, which is vital data for our client’s sales team.

The new org provides significantly improved visibility of the data and since that data is now cleaner, more accurate and located across two central silos: Salesforce and SAP, the value is much greater. The organisation’s Sales team have everything they need to follow their sales process, allowing them to see clearly what a customer has to invest and what investment they already have with the business.

Using Salesforce features, users are now guided into completing all relevant information about the customer and their sales, allowing for greater reporting capabilities. Synchronisation between Salesforce and our client’s on-premise SAP installation means that data is sent and received across both platforms at the right time.

“We thoroughly enjoyed working with Bluewave, and are confident we made the right choice of partner for the project. The Bluewave team did a great job, with their Solution Architect, Project Manager, and Delivery team really going above and beyond. They could not have been more helpful or knowledgeable. We genuinely feel they made a difference to the quality of the project outcome.” – Technical Project Lead at our Customer’s Organisation