hitting the high notes
Rev-A-Shelf ®, headquartered in Kentucky, has a unique sales model, selling to residential design firms, cabinetmakers, and distributors around the world. Although their product wows and speaks for itself, the sales team knows that building and nurturing relationships with distributors is how they will continue to expand and grow their worldwide market share.
your look behind-the-scenes
Rev-A-Shelf ®, the market-leading innovator of quality, functional residential cabinet storage and organizational products, will literally change the way you think about cabinet organization. Their innovative approach to how we arrange our “whole home” – for the last 36 years – utilizes all the extra wasted spaces and leaves us feeling completely in control of our lives.
please excuse the technical difficulties
The 36-year old company used a legacy CRM to manage sales data. It had been customized over time, and each update would break the custom features. They had outgrown their system, and it was time to move to a robust platform, like Salesforce. After migrating effectively to Salesforce, Rev-A-Shelf accomplished their initial goals. They had a stable system that could handle updates, and they had preserved all legacy data.
When Hex Persephone joined the company as the CRM Digital Development Program Manager, he quickly saw a few areas that needed immediate attention. There was a disconnect between the shiny new technology and how the sales team worked through a distributor model, and therefore, the migration to Salesforce was met with low adoption.
One of his top three goals was Salesforce adoption , and in order to get there, Hex knew he needed to revise and remodel the Salesforce Cloud a bit to make it align more perfectly with how they conduct business, and make it easier for the sales teams to build and nurture relationships with their distributors as they continue to expand across the globe.
Hex listened to how the front line sales team viewed the initial Salesforce build out. They felt like the old system was something they were familiar with, and were now being asked to learn a completely new technology. They felt it was unnecessary and more sophisticated than anyone needed to use. He remembers them saying, “Please, why on earth would I want to record a note, log a phone call, or put my events in there?”
Hex clearly knows how empowering Salesforce can be, so he made it his number one goal to remodel the system to match the business processes that would make it easy and impactful for the team. They needed to be able to see the value in it and the powerful outcomes at their fingertips, and that would take a bit of revising within the system.
“I’ve never seen anything handle customization and updates at the same time like Salesforce does.”
– Hex Persephone, Rev-A-Shelf
solutions that take center stage
Hex engaged VectorX and worked directly with Kristen Chase to align business processes with their company technology.
VectorX, a Salesforce Development and Business Consulting firm, helped to guide Rev-A-Shelf through the process of making Salesforce more functional, useful, and meaningful.
Kristen describes the problem with the Salesforce instance when she began working with Hex.
“It didn’t go far enough to be useful. They could log their account details. In large part, they could put their accounts in, and that was great, but they couldn’t see sales data around it. And that is the sort of thing that makes Salesforce much more useful for them, rather than just having a list of accounts and their phone numbers – having solid data that gives them insight and realtime sales metrics for their accounts month over month and year over year.”
— Kristen Chase, VectorX
One of the most helpful additions was bringing in sales data from the ERP. Previously, this data was exported to a spreadsheet and shared upon request. In Excel form, one couldn’t see the full story year over year or look holistically at data in a meaningful way. After building this integration in Salesforce, the data is visual and organized and supports the sales team’s efforts to follow product placement and sales numbers. This makes it easier to get three- and six-month comparisons and follow trends, and see where the company stands in various sales categories.
“Salespeople became more informed, know where to focus, whom to call, and how to spend their time.”
— Hex Persephone, Rev-A-Shelf
Hex and Kristen worked together to help the customer service team deliver an exceptional experience; they support distributors in the sales process and homeowners through the warranty and questions.
Hex had heard from the customer service team that they wanted to be able to help those customers who called in and needed replacement parts. Previously, they would write down the request and have to walk it down the hallway to talk to the sales team to get those ordered.
“A replacement part order is not truly a sale, and yet they were manually bringing the sales team into that. Now they are able to capture that and start the process within the system independently.”
— Kristen Chase, VectorX
Hex and Kristen revised the system to enable the customer service team to initiate replacement part orders directly from Salesforce.
outcome
At VectorX, we see broken technology every single day. We see companies trying to function and enable their teams to do amazing work so they can make their mark on the world. And we know that each of these companies exists because they can solve problems for their customers and make the world a better place.
Rev-A-Shelf is an award-winning, creative, and innovative business with clever home solutions, and we believe in their ability to make an impact. Our job here at VectorX was to simplify their work – to help Hex match the technology to the actual business processes – so their team can work in flow rather than in resistance. And by doing that, we believe we’ve made an impact that will free them up to show up for their customers in greater and more impactful ways.
“I couldn’t say enough good things about Kristen because she’s possibly the best developer, best super admin that I’ve worked with. It could be that we just have a very synergistic communication style. We definitely have a critical foundation of trust. And I’ll say, VectorX is key. They really get it and understand what the mission is and can see the needs and deliver.”
— Hex Persephone, Rev-A-Shelf