Case study: Software reseller improves Salesforce

“Today, I feel confident that we can get anyone up to speed quickly on Salesforce without a ton of formal training because it’s set up to track what we need most. We never would have been able to achieve this without Idealist Consulting.”
-Technical Account Manager

Applied CAx is a Portland-based software reseller company whose mission is to leverage the combined knowledge of their partner companies and provide clients with the world's most advanced engineering software, training and support. They have had several years of steady growth (making the top 100 Fastest Growing Businesses in Oregon list in 2015) and have been on Salesforce for years now. They engaged Idealist Consulting with a tech support agreement to re-focus on their core sales process and develop deeper trust in their data.

Needed outside perspective to apply best practices

Like many small businesses, Applied CAx’s Salesforce users have many different roles within the company, and cleaning up data was never the top priority. Plus, like with many growing businesses they had seen a lot of turnover in Salesforce users, and every time someone left they would lose knowledge.

Applied CAx engaged Idealist Consulting in order to bring in some experts who could steer them toward best practices and establish a “single source of truth” to develop more confidence in their process.

Salesforce used as “institutional brain” for account details

Specifically, Applied CAx has many partners like Siemens where they need to see the same view as the client in the Siemens system. Through this project, Applied CAx made a commitment to upload all account information, including login and pricing details, in Salesforce so that they wouldn’t have to go to outside sites for information. This was a big timesaver since many sites have tricky login authentication.

Additionally, Idealist Consulting has helped to clean up data using free data de-duping tools, and added fields for other client information such as existing assets and purchase date. A tiering system for the sales team to look at accounts was also added.

What’s next

Looking ahead, Applied CAx is interested in moving their case management process into Salesforce, which would give their support team insight into customers that they didn’t previously have. This has been a source of frustration in different departments and moving to Salesforce would help streamline processes by bringing more users into the same system.

“Working with Idealist Consulting made life really easy. They were great at listening to what we were trying to achieve and at no point put pressure on us to go in a certain direction. They just generally got it.”