Salesforce development for a construction company

Solution

After analyzing the source code, project documentation, and the knowledge transferred by the Salesforce admin, we started working on the solution optimization with the focus on automation and KPI tracking improvement.

Automation and customizations

To help the sales reps boost their Salesforce adoption, our team performed a set of vital customizations:

• We automated the process of assigning clients to territories that was previously performed manually. 
• We configured appointment notifications to be sent automatically based on specific triggers. For example, when the appointment data and/or location is changed, it triggers the system to automatically send notifications to the required attendees. 

We also helped the customer solve the problem of sending appointments and notifications to non-Salesforce contacts. The Salesforce system allows sending invitations only to contacts found in the user base. Therefore, to send invitations to new clients, sales reps had to add their contact to the user base and fill in contact-related information. We came up with a workaround by adding an ‘External Invitees’ field for creating a temporary contact. To avoid overloading the user base, we configured the system to monitor temporary contacts and delete them in case they were not converted into accounts or there were no more actions associated with these contacts for three months. 

We also performed code refactoring to correct mistakes resulted from poor integration between the customer’s internal price calculation system and the Salesforce-based solution. For instance, there was a great amount of legacy data and duplicates in the customer’s internal system, where multiple disparate records could relate to the same contact. After code refactoring, all client records were de-duplicated and could be conveniently found in one place.

KPI tracking and reports

The customer’s Salesforce solution was used by two types of users—external teams of sales representatives assigned to a specific territory and regional sales executives, who managed territories united into regions. The customer wanted each user to be able to see specific reports with unique records, accurate data, and KPIs generated based on the regional differences in prices, discounts, etc. 

The Salesforce platform is built on a layered data-sharing model that helped us create sharing rules and make relevant data available to respective users. However, the customer’s system had only one record owner, who posed as an integration user pulling data from the customer’s internal system. For this reason, it was challenging to divide data for different user groups. 

To overcome this limitation, our team enabled and configured the Salesforce territory management feature, which allowed us to map relevant sales data to corresponding sales users. As a result, each sales rep could filter reports by their opportunities, appointments, the total number of completed deals, and more. Regional sales managers could filter reports by their sales teams, reviewing their progress and making changes accordingly. 

Itransition’s team created several types of KPI charts and focus dashboards tailored to each user role (regional sales manager/territory sales manager). The charts are updated in real time with such metrics as:  

• The number of visits to client sites in the past two weeks
• Scheduled visits for the next week
• Current tasks/events/activities  
• Open opportunities by stage/project package status  
• Closed won/lost opportunities by month/year  
• Conversion rates  
• Big deal alerts 

Additionally, the system provided sales reps with a map that displayed their assigned territories along with their clients’ locations marked on it.