In a groundbreaking move, Fisher & Paykel, renowned globally for its premium appliance designs and manufacturing, has drastically overhauled its B2B sales operations by integrating a custom sales app, thanks to the collaboration with Nintex and Salesforce. Facing challenges with disjointed systems that bogged down their sales processes, Fisher & Paykel embarked on a journey to unify and streamline operations, leading to a seamless, efficient workflow that empowers their sales team. The creation of a bespoke app not only placed crucial data at the sales representatives’ fingertips but also significantly enhanced their ability to access real-time customer insights and manage inventory and sales processes effectively. Through this strategic implementation, Fisher & Paykel exemplifies how embracing technological solutions like Nintex and Salesforce can revolutionize sales strategies, leading to improved outcomes and fostering innovation within the industry.
Challenge
In the spring of 2013, the sales excellence team at Fisher & Paykel faced a complex problem: the sales team was using several disconnected systems to track their sales activities, resulting in an inefficient and confusing sales process. Each sales person used their own email and calendar services, not connected to a universal customer relationship management (CRM) system, making it impossible for managers to track partner sales.
Fisher & Paykel wanted a single solution to manage both inventory and sales processes. They researched CRM products, and decided to buy Salesforce because of its robust data-management capabilities.
Anthony Belsham, head of global sales excellence, led the Salesforce implementation. However, he quickly realized that the standard Salesforce® processes didn’t fit the way Fisher & Paykel’s sales reps worked. Anthony wanted to make advanced customizations, creating an app that would meet the team’s needs. Fisher & Paykel developers started building their own custom applications in Visualforce, but the solution wasn’t scalable. Delivering a custom sales app from code would have required hiring a team of developers solely for this project.
Solutions
Even though he was advised to stick with the standard user interface, Anthony knew there had to be a better way to extend the UI without writing code. That’s when he heard about Nintex Apps for Salesforce, formerly known as Skuid, a code-free app that lets users customize their Salesforce user experience in real time. He looked Nintex up on the Salesforce AppExchange and installed a free trial. He built a prototype to demo to his team in a matter of days, and they were sold.
Fisher & Paykel’s global sales excellence team worked in tandem with developers to create an app that put data at the fingertips of their reps. Through the app, reps can now see customers insights in a single view, updated in real time from their back-end distribution database. The company’s developers even integrated Nintex Document Generation [Drawloop®] so reps can easily generate content to use in sales conversations to enable business outcomes with customers. As the development team became more familiar with Nintex, they started thinking of other problems Nintex could help them solve.
Instead of their sales team handing out paper surveys at training sessions, they built a survey app that their reps can open in their iPad and see notes and survey results within the account.
The team also created their own configure price quote (CPQ) app, where reps can generate, review, and approve a quote, and also send a document out for signature— all from one screen.
“They had no idea what they wanted the CPQ system to look like,” says Shireen Cowie, Salesforce system administrator at Fisher & Paykel. “Nintex helped us put a prototype together fairly quickly, and we were able to iterate instantly. The app went from prototype to testing to deployment in just six weeks!”
Fisher & Paykel even used Nintex to enhance internal communications with a souped up version of the Salesforce Chatter feature. This allows them to use Chatter in ways that standard Salesforce wouldn’t allow, further uniting different groups of employees in one place.
“There are multiple applications out there that we could’ve just installed out of the box to do the work for us, but we loved that Nintx allowed us to use the applications we started with and build based around that without having to add multiple vendors and multiple applications to Salesforce,” Shireen says.
Results
Fisher & Paykel has achieved strong adoption among its sales reps since they launched their app in 2013. Because the sales team captures useful data, Fisher & Paykel’s management team now has information that can be used to make strategic decisions, and sales reps have the tools to turn leads into customers.
Nintex Apps for Salesforce has enabled Fisher & Paykel’s development team to be agile, continually challenging and improving the interface. Today, the development team works with the global sales excellence team to creatively meet user needs.
“Nintex Apps for Salesforce has allowed us to take a truly agile approach to interface development and respond to our users’ requirements,” says Adrian Watt, global commercial messaging manager at Fisher & Paykel. “It has allowed us to do things with Salesforce that we wouldn’t have been able to do with the standard interface and without the cost— both time and money—of developing a custom app.”
