Salesforce is the global CRM leader that empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. Salesforce is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California with global revenue of 10.48 billion USD.
Over the past 19 years, Salesforce has completely changed the way businesses connect with their customers through the use of cloud, social, mobile IoT, and AI technologies. Present in India for the past 13 years, Salesforce has customers like Vashi Electricals, iQor, Godrej, Bajaj Finserv, Urban Ladder, InMobi, Janalakshmi Finance, etc. and India is one of the fastest-growing regions for Salesforce globally.
Here we are explaining how Vashi Electricals plugs into digital transformation with Salesforce Solutions.
Over the past four decades, Vashi Electricals has grown from humble beginnings as a small family business into a major Indian channel partner for industrial electrical and power transmission products. After more than 40 years in business, Vashi Electricals is embracing digital transformation to power its next phase of growth.
Today, the company connects around 15,000 companies with more than 40,000 products from over 25 world-class global brands. This requires an enormous network of more than 300 sales staff in 27 sales offices across India. The company also operates a 1 million square foot logistics center, and more than 16 warehouse facilities throughout the country.
Managing a sales and distribution network of this size and complexity is a mighty task. But Suraj Dodeja, Director and second-generation owner of Vashi Electricals, credits much of the company’s success to its customer-first approach and zero-corruption system with no hidden charges.
“Our model is very different because we are not just a distributor,” he says. “More and more customers today want to work with us directly because we offer an effective consultancy service along with the technical products. We are striving to be a one-stop solutions provider, and our customers respect us for that.”
Suraj also sees the potential to unlock significant growth going forward. “While we currently work with 15,000 companies annually, there are around 200,000 potential customers in our landscape.”
Sparking growth through digital transformation
Unlocking that growth potential while maintaining and building the company’s commitment to full-service customer assistance at scale is a significant challenge. However, Suraj is finding the solution in a digital transformation strategy with Salesforce at the core.
Initially working with a home-grown CRM tool, Suraj and his team turned to Salesforce for a more integrated solution with a 360-degree customer view.
“We persisted with our own CRM app for three to four years, but it needed to be upgraded all the time, and was often offline. We were spending more time on the app than on doing business, and business generation and opportunity conversion were uphill tasks,” he says.
“We needed a change. We wanted to work with the best in the industry, and while we looked at other vendors, Salesforce provides the 360-degree customer platform we needed, with maximum innovation and all functionality available at the click of a button.”
“Salesforce provides the 360-degree customer platform we needed, with maximum innovation and all functionality available at the click of a button,” says Suraj Dodeja, Director, Vashi Electricals
Supercharging the sales pipeline
Suraj and his team are using Sales Cloud for end-to-end pipeline management, and Service Cloud predominantly as an email management tool. Pardot is also used for lead generation.
“We don’t only use Sales Cloud as an opportunity conversion tool,” Suraj explains. “Our entire sales process is captured on Sales Cloud, from customer inquiry to collection. This gives our sales team one view of the entire sales process, rather than just looking at opportunities.”
Service Cloud is used to manage the approximately 2,000 new order or inquiry emails the company receives on a daily basis. Cases are created based on the product line, then automatically assigned to the right brand team and integrated with Sales Cloud for follow-up.
“We use Pardot to run up-sell campaigns based on lead scoring to ensure we are reaching the right people,” says Suraj. “The integration between Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Pardot on a single platform gives all our team members a complete view of what is happening with any account.
“In practice, that means all the data and dashboards help our sales team to understand customers better. For example, salespeople know how much business we did with a given customer during the previous year, which product lines they purchased, any live opportunities they are interested in, and key prospects based on data from Pardot — all available on the same screen.”
Electrifying productivity with Salesforce
Productivity has increased as salespeople across the company embrace this new way to work.
“There is a huge difference internally. Our salespeople can now identify which customers to focus on, and can, therefore, plan their days more productively,” he explains. “Sales team dependence on the back office has come down drastically.”
Suraj also points out that opportunity closure rates are up 10 percent (from 20 to 30 percent), and email response times have dropped significantly due to less time spent on manually assembling data from Excel spreadsheets.
“The Salesforce adoption rate among our salespeople is very high, with 90 percent of our sales team using it every day,” he adds.
The next stop on the company’s digitalization roadmap is a WhatsApp integration and bot-based interaction that aims to reduce customer dependency on salespeople. Combined with new Salesforce-led efficiencies, that will continue to improve customer outcomes.
“If my salespeople are more efficient and better informed, our customers automatically benefit,” Suraj concludes. “The level of customer consulting we now provide would not have been possible without a solution like this. Salesforce enables us to do business better and smarter.”
