Client Success Snapshot
Client Profile:
- Overview: A leading US provider of controlled environment agriculture (CEA)
- Industry: Manufacturing
- Team Size: N/A
- Annual Revenue: N/A
- Headquarters: OH, USA
- Markets: North America
The Challenge
After completing several acquisitions, an American Agtech provider found itself struggling to bridge multiple digital frameworks into a functional whole. The silos incurred during acquisition inhibited efficiency and cross-team collaboration; even tracking customer leads and project progression could be a challenge if data happened to be scattered across multiple systems. This disorganization prevented the client from attaining the value it hoped to achieve through acquisition.
Gerent’s Approach
After taking some time to fully understand the client’s technical challenges and goals, Gerent suggested implementing Sales Cloud, Salesforce’s integrated sales platform. Aside from providing a unified hub for operations, this implementation would deliver crucial tools and functionalities such as Assets, Chatter, and Salesforce Mobile. Gerent also agreed to help the company migrate and organize its data into Sales Cloud.
Key Outcomes
Post-implementation, the client was able to eliminate its acquisition-caused silos and build a foundation for its consolidated operations. It also established a shared, readily-accessible source of truth, so reps no longer needed to waste time chasing down up-to-date contract details or piecing together scattered customer records. Once equipped with a unified, cohesive digital framework, the company could finally achieve the full value-add potential it had expected from its acquisitions.
Client Success Story
Acquisitions are all about building value quickly. A company sees a quality in another business that it believes will complement its own operations or offerings — then, rather than building similar functionality from scratch in-house, it simply purchases the other organization. However, while bringing a new company into the proverbial fold can provide substantial value, it can also lead to significant complications.
These particular growing pains had become all too familiar for our client, a leading US provider of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) greenhouse solutions and cultivation services, by the time they approached us in the summer of 2021.
Prior to its partnership with Gerent, the company had achieved considerable growth through acquisition, folding no less than three companies into its corporate structure within the last five years. These acquisitions empowered our client to extend its reach, deepen its service catalog, and achieve new operational capabilities, among other benefits.
However, the situation wasn’t exactly ideal; after completing several acquisitions, the company found itself struggling to bridge multiple digital frameworks into a functional whole.
Acquisition silos pose significant operational and efficiency challenges
Our client’s ability to reap value from its acquisitions was limited by its increasingly-siloed systems. Every business welcomed into the CEA service provider’s corporate family brought its own digital framework and operational approach.
“When they came to us, they were using Microsoft Dynamics, a homegrown CRM system called Soho, and a lot of Excel spreadsheets to manage their customer data and operations,” the project’s PM, Valentine Christopher, explained in an interview.
After completing several acquisitions, the company found itself struggling to bridge multiple digital frameworks into a functional whole. Silos formed during the acquisitions process inhibited efficiency and cross-team collaboration; even tracking customer leads and project progression could be a challenge if data happened to be scattered across multiple systems.
“The team didn’t want to dig through five systems to figure out how they reached out to a client, what they ended up selling, and what service or support the client had received to date,” Christopher summarized.
Our client needed an organized hub to support its unified operations and process — and to find it, the CEA solution provider’s leaders turned to Gerent, a Summit-level Salesforce implementation partner.
Gerent bridges over silos and enables unified, efficient operations with an out-of-the-box Salesforce Sales Cloud integration
After taking some time to fully understand the CEA solutions providers’ technical challenges and goals, Gerent recommended a straightforward solution: implementing Sales Cloud.
Sales Cloud is an integrated Salesforce platform that consolidates consumer information into a central hub and provides crucial support for marketing, lead generation, sales, business analytics, and customer service activities. Gerent’s out-of-the-box implementation bridged the silos separating the acquisitions’ respective teams and provided the business with a foundation for its unified processes.
A few products within the Sales Cloud product set proved particularly useful. The platform’s Assets, for example, allowed our client to keep an organized record of every product its consumers buy and any service requests or communications made since the sale. If a customer called to request repairs, the service team could simply search the device’s serial number to find detailed product descriptions, installation records, and applicable warranty policies.
This quick-search capability was a game-changer for the company’s customer service divisions, as data silos between asset sales and service teams had previously undermined customer service efforts. But once Sales Cloud established a shared, readily-accessible source of truth, reps no longer needed to waste time chasing down up-to-date details or piecing together scattered customer records — they simply delivered top-caliber service.
Other key products included Chatter, a collaboration tool embedded in the Sales Cloud platform, and Salesforce Mobile, an app that allows representatives in the field to access and add critical data. Our developers also completed a small amount of custom code to connect Panda Doc, the company’s existing document signing and generation platform, into Sales Cloud. This integration empowered the sales team to generate quotes quickly within Salesforce.
Data migration poses a final — but manageable — challenge
After implementing a framework for the CEA service provider’s operations, Gerent faced another hurdle: migrating the company’s scattered data stores into Sales Cloud.
“Data uploads are always the biggest challenge, and Gerent stepped up and helped clean up our source data, ensuring a smooth transition into the database,” a representative for the company shared in its debrief with Salesforce. “The response time was very quick, and usually, issues were resolved within a few minutes of reporting.”
Porting the data from the company’s former systems took time and considerable effort — but by the end of the project’s 12-week span, everything was in place. Post-implementation, the client was able to eliminate its acquisition-caused silos, build a foundation for its consolidated operations and finally reap the full value-add potential it had expected from its acquisitions.
“Working with Gerent was a pleasure. They were clear with direction, helpful with assistance, and together we managed to get the implementation done on time and under budget,” the representative concluded.
Interested in finding out how our team could help yours achieve its operational goals? Contact Gerent today for a personalized consultation!
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