Permeated with sales innovations: Ecco Products' switch to Salesforce

Oct 16, 2023
  • sales, marketing and service

Ecco Products, a developer and manufacturer of ecological solutions for water management and landscaping, is growing fast. As always, that comes with its fair share of challenges, from guarding product quality to scaling and optimizing sales processes. To stay ahead of the curve, the company decided to swap its legacy CRM for a full-fledged Salesforce solution. And that’s where Cloud Innovation, now part of the delaware family, came in.

  • Client: Ecco Products, developer and manufacturer of ecological solutions for water management and landscaping
  • Challenge: Fast growth has led to more time spent on administrative follow-up instead of the actual sales process
  • Solution: Replacing the legacy CRM system with the cloud-based Salesforce business platform

The challenge: sales solutions that hold water

The key to Ecco Products’ success is its constant focus on quality, innovation, user-friendliness, and top-notch customer service. For this, the team needs to continuously analyze the market and push the envelope in the creation of intelligent products. The goal? Full control over the entire workflow, from R&D to sales. 

Ecco Products relies on a unique network of European distributors to get its products to its end users. To manage this network, the team uses specialized marketing tools. Confronted with the company’s rapid growth, however, the team’s legacy marketing software proved unable to scale and failed to provide the necessary support. Concretely, this meant that sales experts were spending an increasingly bigger proportion of their time on administrative tasks. Time that could be better spent on talking with customers and prospects, and on closing deals. 

Ecco’s sales experts were spending an increasingly bigger proportion of their time on administrative tasks. Time that could be better spent on talking with customers and prospects, and on closing deals.

The solution: Cloud, coaching, and collaboration

Through joint workshops, Cloud Innovation got a thorough understanding of the company’s current way of working, its pitfalls, and, crucially, what it would take to put something better in place. Once the requirements were defined, it became obvious that Salesforce, the cloud-based business platform, was the best choice. More specifically the following solutions:

  • Sales Cloud, a set of tools of which the functionalities cover the typical CRM requirements, including account and contact management, opportunity and pipeline management, and activity management and reporting. Sales Cloud empowers both the sales team and their managers to take their account management and sales process to the next level.  
  • Visit 360, an accelerator developed by Cloud Innovation, enabled Ecco Products to optimize on-site visits. How? By helping sales experts to prioritize accounts, determine account-specific tasks and objectives, and generate elaborate reports – including fully-automated visit reports in PDF format.   

Cloud Innovation’s approach laid the groundwork for a successful implementation that focused on maximizing adoption. After rigorous testing by key users, the team organized coaching sessions to capture everyone’s feedback. These were not your typical dull monologues, but engaging hands-on sessions that zoomed in on the end user’s daily routine. 

Thanks to rock-solid collaboration and transparent communication, the go-live went very smoothly. This was in no small part the result of thorough testing and great coaching during the project. Even after go-live, coaching sessions and evaluations continued to take place to account for changing business processes and new, innovative functionalities included in every Salesforce update.  

Cloud Innovation’s approach laid the groundwork for a successful implementation that focused on maximizing adoption.

The result: Synergy and continuous optimization

Thanks to the great synergy between Sales Cloud and Visit 360, Ecco was able to alleviate and simplify a lot of the administrative work for their sales representatives. On top of streamlining the data input process, the Salesforce Lighting UI provides a better overview of all the information within the system. Data from Salesforce is also available from any mobile device, which comes in handy for representatives on the road. Sales follow-up isn’t as time-consuming anymore, either. And thanks to Salesforce Reports & Dashboards, it’s easy to stay on top of what’s happening, and to take the right actions when needed.  

Because of its scalability, the Salesforce platform is perfectly capable of supporting Ecco’s growth. What’s more, Salesforce’s continuous innovation keeps inspiring Ecco to adopt the latest functionalities, and to optimize their processes as needed. 

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