Case Study
Reconstructing complicated legacy Salesforce systems in the B2B marketing sector
B2B Marketing is a leading provider of professional content, events and training, specifically designed to meet the needs of the global B2B sector. It provides over 100,000 members with the insights, tools and opportunities they require to increase their business’ competitive advantage, with the ultimate goal of putting marketing at the heart of every business and maximising marketing performance.
As B2B Marketing’s business had grown, its processes and systems had evolved organically. Various customisations had been added on an ad hoc basis to support pressing business needs as they cropped up. However, some of these customisations had inhibited the core functionality of the system, meaning that managing the renewals of the various membership types and reporting upon the buying history of an individual/organisation was becoming increasingly difficult.
B2B Marketing asked us to deconstruct their complicated legacy Salesforce system and then to rebuild it around their core objectives and requirements.
Their ultimate goal was the automation of customer care emails and reminders, invoice creation and system updates. Another key requirement was flexible reporting at every stage of the process. A further significant need was identified during the workshop phase: that of streamlining the current method of sales processing, which was manually intensive and time consuming.
Our first step was to bring B2B Marketing’s existing Salesforce system right back to vanilla. Some of the previous customisations had seriously impaired the use of the platform. Our approach was rather singular, in that rather than adding complicated add-ons and workarounds to get B2B Marketing’s systems working for them again, we opted to cut back on customisation and code.
The solution predominantly used the native functionality in Salesforce, specifically: Assets, Campaigns and time-based Workflows. The sole Apex trigger we employed was associated with the creation of invoices.
B2B Marketing experienced a halving of the time it takes to process a sale. The automated renewal process increased rates of renewal by 15%, and resulted in an increase of 35% in user initiated renewals and contacts.
Our client reports experiencing dramatically improved clarity when it comes to keeping track of the status of its members and the services they purchase.
Such is their satisfaction with results so far, B2B Marketing have now rolled out the process Clarasys implemented across other areas of the organisation. Matt Garisch, Head of Business Development said:
“It was apparent that the Clarasys team understand business processes and have a real aptitude for simplifying them in order to drive effectiveness.
“Working with Clarasys was an absolute pleasure, it took them no time at all to grasp our business needs, cut through the surface of the issue and deliver a solution that is now being used in multiple areas of the business.”
