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CLIENT CASE STUDY

Major bottling company: Sales force automation and retail execution

Discover how Accenture helped a major bottling company provide real-time reporting with an innovative mobile CRM system​.

Overview

The solution also helped improve call planning, collaboration, sales efficiency, account management support and enabled a multichannel strategy. This custom CRM system—built on the cloud-based Salesforce platform—was deployed across eight different countries and to about 2,700 sales representatives. The new CRM system reduced the administrative workload by approximately 30 percent, allowing for more selling time and an improved sales experience due to better collaboration, communication, and business insights based on accurate, real-time reporting driven by transactional customer data-based analytics.

OPPORTUNITY

The company recognized the distinct need for its sales representatives to access account information anytime and anywhere from their mobile devices. This level of access would also allow sales teams to collaborate while traveling to client sites and retail locations. To create more capabilities for its sales representatives in the field, the company needed to align its business units into a unified customer relationship management (CRM) process, which would:

  • Boost sales force efficiency with standardized sales processes, increase return on investment (ROI) and lower cost per contact.

  • Enable a multichannel strategy with multiple customer contact channels (contact center, e-commerce portal, etc.), a seamless customer experience, the right channel mix and optimized market coverage.

  • Support account management.

  • Improve point of sale (POS) execution through tracked successes, stronger compliance and better store visibility.

  • Improve collaboration, communication, business insights and information-sharing between sales directors, managers and sales representatives in stores or visiting client sites.

Due to the short deployment lead time, ease of maintenance and support provided, and low overall costs, the company chose to implement a customized mobile CRM solution built from scratch that used the Salesforce platform.

SOLUTION

The company chose to work with Accenture due to its deep knowledge of Salesforce and CRM processes, including the right technical skills for the size and scope of the project. Together the company and Accenture built the Salesforce solution to help speed up the European deployment time across eight countries and for about 2,700 sales representatives.

Accenture helped with the rapid design, development and deployment of a mobile pan-European sales force automation and retail execution solution, which included reporting capabilities. There was a cloud-based solution for call planning and preparation activities and a mobile solution for field sales support and in-store execution. The solution also created real-time reporting-driven capabilities, which gave sales directors and managers a better view into how sales representatives are doing in the field, which in turn helps daily reporting and allows the managers and directors to adjust their business decision-making according to the insights generated from the data.

Using the Accenture SaaS Delivery Toolkit, the Accenture team leveraged best practices from both Agile and Waterfall software development methodologies to plan, analyze, design, build, test, deploy and support the solution.

RESULTS

In just six months, the mobile solution was launched in the Netherlands to 250 users. Over the course of the following nine months, the solution was successfully deployed to more than 2,000 additional users across Western Europe and the Nordic countries.

The benefits of the new sales representative capabilities the solution provided included:

  • A sales representative’s daily administration load decreasing and more efficient in-store execution that was reinvested in selling time and led to an increase of 20 percent in sales representative visit coverage.

  • Increased POS compliance due to sales representatives automating POS execution through the integration of photo recognition on the Salesforce platform.

  • Seamless collaboration between call center agents and sales representatives, which enabled the company’s multichannel customer contact strategy.

  • Accurate and real-time reporting driven by transactional customer data-based analytics enabled in terms of store visits executed, surveys taken, orders completed and other metrics to track productivity.

With the CRM system in place, the company is equipped to improve the overall sales experience through enhanced communication, collaboration, business insights and information-sharing.