Rinnai Australia says it expects its reps to cut the CPQ — configure, price, quote — process from days to hours by using Salesforce Quote-to-Cash for sales of commercial hot water systems.
Rinnai Australia’s national strategy and planning manager, Andrew Boland, said that he believes the move will eventually mean the company’s sales reps can produce quotes as they finish up sales meetings. Revisions will be much easier and faster as well, Boland said.
Rinnai Australia offers hot water, heating and cooling and counts major retailers including Harvey Norman and The Good Guys among its customers.
The company is part of the global Rinnai Group, which operates in close to 20 countries.
The third edition of Salesforce’s State of Sales research report found that 40 per cent of the teams surveyed employed a CPQ solution (the report is based on a survey of more than 2900 sales professionals, including more than 950 in Australia). High-performing teams were 2.1 times more likely to use CPQ solution, the survey found.
Rinnai Australia has been using the SaaS CRM for around six years, according to national customer administration manager Amanda Boorer.
Other Rinnai businesses use Salesforce, but Boorer says that Australia is a leader when it comes to using the cloud-based CRM offering.
Prior to implementing Salesforce, the company didn’t have a CRM system at all, Boorer said.
“When we were talking about implementing a CRM system we looked at many customer relationship systems, and every avenue seemed to fall back to Salesforce,” she said. “We ended up choosing Salesforce and at this stage are very happy with it.”
Initially the rollout focused on the company’s call centre operations.
“We wanted to record the calls that were coming in and actually place them under certain headers – so we raised cases within Salesforce and we set up a structure where we had it price and availability, delivery issues, stock availability – anything like that.”
A few months’ worth of data was gathered and analysed to find out why people were contacting the Rinnai call centre.
“A lot of our calls were actually requiring ETAs,” Boorer said. “Based on that, we worked with our IT department and set up automatic acknowledgements to go out to the customer.”
That change cut ETA calls by 38 per cent the next month.
Using a cloud-based system was a natural fit for the company, particularly since it has since expanded the use of Salesforce to include its 30-odd sales reps.
“We wanted to make sure that the reps that were out on the road could access everything that was going on internally so they didn’t have to phone up to find out what was happening,” Boorer said. “It was seamless from our point of view.”
“We implemented Salesforce within the contact centre first of all and really stuck within the contact centre for four years and then rolled out the Salesforce1 app for the sales guys,” she said.
“They’ve got the Salesforce1 app on their phones,” she said.
“It’s really good because every time we create a case we can actually alert them within that case by using Chatter — it will automatically go through and alert them that there’s a case.
“A lot of the time we can actually be doing that while we’re talking to that customer – so as soon as we’ve hung up [the sales rep] can actually contact the customer and tell them that they’re on top of it.”