Challenge

AMD anticipated big growth and needed processes and systems to help them achieve it. The company had been using homegrown tools to manage its sales process, including different applications and websites for forecasting, pricing and quoting requests, account management, and other administrative tasks.

Without a unified system, accurate forecasting and tying revenue back to specific sales were challenging. AMD sells processors that are used in a variety of devices such as laptops, servers, and supercomputers. That presents a multi-tier forecasting challenge of trying to connect what they sell to what their customers sell.

Realizing the need to consolidate disparate systems and data in a central application, AMD began evaluating CRM solutions. Sellers needed a one-stop-shop that both streamlined workflows and data entry while providing key insights into the company’s sales process.

AMD chose Salesforce and designed its first Salesforce release to support its server market and commercial pipeline efforts. John Stage, senior manager of business operations, and his team had significant customization needs, and traditional coding was not feasible within their aggressive timeline. It was then the company began investigating compatible alternatives.

Solution

In July 2019, AMD combined Skuid with Salesforce. The sales team’s next revenue forecast was scheduled for October and reps needed a user-friendly interface.

Using the app that AMD created with Skuid, reps could clone a previous quarter’s forecast as a starting point for the next quarter, scaling it up or down as they saw fit. This helped sellers save time with data entry and focus on the deltas.

“Skuid is very flexible,” John said. “We quickly realized that we needed to take its capabilities into account when designing the architecture of our new system. The possibilities using Skuid and Salesforce together were so great.”

Alfredo Silva, UI capabilities manager at AMD, said “Just the exposure to Skuid helped us understand what makes sense to do natively in Salesforce versus what we can do in Skuid. And, it helps us understand how we can deliver service to our users because it's opened our eyes much more.”

Results

Using Skuid and Salesforce has helped AMD focus on the voice of the user. The company’s Salesforce instance now supports 150 users and 20 different teams around the globe. The new app reduces the time spent on forecasting from over four hours a week to about 30 minutes. And, those valuable 30 minutes are spent strategically reviewing the information. This allows AMD employees to focus their efforts on selling, not inputting data.

Sandy Walker, global salesforce administrator, appreciates how much the team learned about its own data and regional processes.

“The tool itself was very good for giving us a broader view of what our users are actually doing,” Sandy said.

The sales forecasting app has had a huge impact and high visibility. AMD’s attainment process constantly monitors the sales team’s progress in achieving quarterly goals—critical to financial reporting. Typically, AMD would run attainment on a weekly basis. Using the revenue forecasting app they created with Skuid, reps are now forecasting numbers on a daily basis, and they can forecast up to three quarters in the future. The new tool queries 130 rows of very complex data, and it comes back in 5 seconds. With the old system, this would easily take 15 minutes or more to load.

In addition to the revenue forecasting app, AMD completely revamped its pricing system to integrate with Salesforce. This has reduced the administrative burden for reps, saving them two to three hours each week.

Other apps created with Skuid assist in tracking AMD product distribution for large retailers and resellers, which helps the worldwide team better forecast what’s happening with retailers in each region and predict the commercial forecast with more accuracy.

“With the apps we built using Skuid and the new processes we’ve rolled out in the last year, we’re now able to take end customer opportunities in our pipeline and connect them directly to revenue shipments,” John said.

“In executive meetings, we’re having higher quality conversations about what we can do in the business, how we can expand market share, and where we need to take the product portfolio," said Alfredo. "And it's driven by this connection between the downstream demand signal and the tactical manufacturing and shipment of chips. That's one area where I think Skuid has been instrumental because it helps us visualize that connection.”