15 Sep Salesforce Transformations: How a Small, Growing Business Was Able To Scale Seamlessly

If you own a small, rapidly-growing businesses it may sound like a dream come true—but it doesn’t come without its fair share of nightmares along the way! Such companies rapidly outgrow their business processes and this creates headaches in all areas of the day-to-day running of the business. Often, they muddle along with inefficient processes, poor communication, and frequent costly errors that harm relationships with customers. Ultimately, service delivery problems lead to customers leaving and the nightmares beginning for the business owner. But turning this round is often simply a case of re-defining the sales processes and introducing more automation to improve the service delivery for clients. Salesforce is one of the best tools for achieving this. An excellent example of how Salesforce can help in this scenario came to light recently with a company we provided a QuickStart for in Birmingham, AL.

Steel City Pops

Steel City Pops was founded only five years ago. The company makes delicious, gourmet pops using locally-sourced natural ingredients that contain none of the bad stuff, like refined sugars or high fructose corn syrup. Fortunately, the idea caught on rapidly. The company has expanded quickly—and they now have 21 locations across the South. Customers can purchase their pops directly from the outlets or they can be catered at special events. The catering side of the business has been particularly successful.

Key Business Challenges

The company has to manage a considerable volume of events—or ‘Happenings’ as they are called in the Steel City Pops world. The key challenges were mainly in the catering side of the business, due to its rapid expansion:

• It was using manual ordering, confirmation, fulfillment, and event management—which was no longer viable
• Many inefficiencies resulted from manual processes, leading to internal and external communication errors and costly mistakes with customer orders
• Bringing new members of staff up to speed on these inefficient, loosely defined manual processes was difficult

The Proposed Solution

When we met with Steel City Pops, it was clear that they needed a system that would allow them to scale their business in a seamless way. We proposed using Salesforce as a way to achieve the following goals:

• A platform where customers could quickly and easily schedule a ‘Happening’
• An easy way to manage all ‘Happenings’
• A system that would allow the company to be more ‘nimble’ and respond to change quicker
• A plan that would allow them to quickly onboard new employees
• A 360-degree view of their customers, locations, products, and events

The Results

Using the power and flexibility of the Salesforce platform, we helped the business to scale with an enhanced way for customers to schedule events and place orders. Customers can now go online and fill out a form that is driven by Formstack and connected to Salesforce. All information is sent from Formstack to Salesforce seamlessly as soon as the form is submitted, which allows the Steel City Pops team to immediately get orders moving. There is also a more automated event management process that all staff understand from beginning to end—including new employees; and a more comprehensive and accurate overview of the business as a whole.

So, in a nutshell, orders are now received and processed quickly and accurately, and visibility, customer communication, and employee training have all improved. A customized, consistent, repeatable, and automated process is now in place.

Employees at Steel City Pops are able to engage on a much deeper level with Salesforce now they understand the full functionality of the platform. This is all due to the company receiving the most professional Salesforce advice and implementation. And they were delighted with the results… “With the introduction of Salesforce, we have seen a drastic increase in team member productivity, accuracy of information and clarity of communication. Though we have only been using Salesforce for about 18 months, it is hard to think of how we ever survived without it. Fast Slow Motion played a crucial part in helping us to mold Salesforce to our company’s structure and they held our hand as we made the jump into this new world. We couldn’t have done it without them.” – Codie Gibbons, Steel City Pops

Getting the Most Out of Salesforce

Salesforce offers a range of functionality that goes far beyond a basic CRM system. But helping businesses see this and lending a guiding hand in selecting what they need to deliver exactly what they expect requires a genuine partner. Make sure you choose a Salesforce partner with the business expertise, extensive technical knowledge, and the required level of professionalism to help you make the most out of Salesforce for your business… …so that the nightmare ends… and the dream continues!
Talk to us now if you are experiencing the type of problems described in this post. Schedule a call with us HERE.