In the spring of 2013, the sales excellence team at Fisher & Paykel faced a complex problem: their sales people used several disconnected systems to track their activities. Each sales person used their own tools, which weren’t connected to their customer relationship management (CRM).
It was inefficient and confusing, and managers struggled to track partner sales. Fisher & Paykel wanted a single app to manage both inventory and sales. They checked out different CRM products, and decided to buy Salesforce because of its great reputation.
Anthony Belsham, head of global sales excellence, led the Salesforce implementation. He quickly realized that the standard Salesforce processes didn’t fit the way Fisher & Paykel’s sales reps worked.
Adrian Watt, Global Commercial Messaging Manager at Fisher & Paykel. Anthony wanted to make advanced customizations, creating an app that would meet the team’s needs. Fisher & Paykel developers started building their own custom applications in Visualforce, but development cost too much to be sustainable.
Delivering a custom sales app from code would have required hiring a team of developers solely for this project.Anthony knew there had to be a better way. That’s when he heard about Skuid. Anthony built a working prototype with Skuid’s free trial in a matter of days. His team was instantly sold and excited to get to work.
Fisher & Paykel’s developers worked hand-in-hand with the global sales excellence team to create an app that put information at reps’ fingertips.
“There are multiple applications out there that we could’ve just installed out of the box to do the work for us, but we loved that Skuid allowed us to use the applications we started with and build based around that without having to add multiple vendors and multiple applications to Salesforce,” says Shireen Cowie, Salesforce system administrator at Fisher & Paykel.
Skuid has allowed us to take a truly agile approach to interface development.
With the new app, reps can see customer insights in a single view, updated in real time from their back-end databases. As the development team became more familiar with Skuid, they started thinking of other problems Skuid could help them solve.
They built solutions in record time, including a custom configure price quote (CPQ) app, where reps can generate, review, and approve a quote, and also send a document out for signature, all from one screen. “They had no idea what they wanted the CPQ system to look like,” Shireen recalls.
“Skuid helped us put a prototype together fairly quickly, and we were able to iterate instantly. The app went from prototype to testing to deployment in just six weeks!”
Fisher & Paykel has achieved strong adoption among its sales reps since they launched their Skuid Salesforce app in 2013. Because the sales team captures useful data, Fisher & Paykel’s management team now has information that can be used to make better decisions, and sales reps have the tools to turn leads into customers.
“Skuid has allowed us to take a truly agile approach to interface development and respond to our users’ requirements,” says Adrian Watt, global commercial messaging manager at Fisher & Paykel.
“It has allowed us to do things with Salesforce that we wouldn’t have been able to do with the standard interface and without the cost, both time and money, of developing a custom app.” To learn more about Fisher & Paykel’s story, read their case study.
