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Sales Cloud Breaks Down Silos for a Major Building Materials Distributor

Client Success Snapshot

Client Profile:

  • Overview: One of the foremost providers of roof and wall-building materials
  • Industry: Building Materials (Construction and Roofing)
  • Team Size: 11-50
  • Annual Revenue: N/A
  • Headquarters: PA,USA
  • Markets: North America

The Challenge

Before 2020, a major materials distributor’s marketing and sales departments worked in relative isolation, rarely collaborating or sharing information. This compartmentalization prevented the company from developing a standard set of best-practices to manage its opportunity pipelines. Recognizing this, its leaders sought to eliminate operational silos by establishing a unified sales and marketing platform.

Gerent's Approach

After consulting with the distributor’s leadership team, Gerent recommended that the organization implement Salesforce Sales Cloud and Pardot to unify its sales and marketing teams. Gerent took a Quick Start approach to implementation; within three weeks, our team established the project’s scope and milestones, tailored Sales Cloud to suit the company’s unique needs, conducted two demos, integrated company feedback, and deployed a finalized build.

Key Outcomes

By implementing Sales Cloud and Pardot, Gerent empowered the materials distributor to establish new best practices for lead generation, qualification, and sales distribution. The implementation further facilitated automated reporting and enabled sales to leverage repeatable processes and boost overall revenue growth.

With Gerent’s help, the company was able to establish a process for nurturing market-qualified leads, break down operational silos, and — most importantly — maintain its competitive presence as one of America’s foremost providers of high-quality roof and wall-building solutions.


Client Success Story

When a major materials distributor approached Gerent in the fall of 2020, it had one goal in mind: to elevate its achievement potential. While the company had established itself as a foremost provider of high-quality roof and wall-building solutions in the United States, it wasn’t attaining the success it expected. The reason for the lapse was apparent — silos within the organization were constraining collaboration and derailing the organization’s strategic alignment.  

The material distributor’s marketing and sales departments worked in relative isolation, rarely collaborating or sharing information. Unfortunately, this compartmentalization prevented the distributor from developing a standard set of best-practices to manage its opportunity pipelines. To address the problem, the company contracted with Gerent — a preferred partner for Salesforce implementations — to establish a CRM framework that would facilitate cross-department transparency and collaboration.


A New Framework for Operational Alignment

After consulting with the distributor’s leadership team, Gerent recommended that the company implement Salesforce Sales Cloud and Pardot to create a consolidated sales and marketing platform. Doing so would empower the organization to: 

  • Establish best practices lead generation, qualification, and distribution to sales
  • Accurately capture pipeline opportunities
  • Record and track interactions with dealers and contractors
  • Facilitate robust automated reporting 
  • Enable sales to leverage repeatable processes and boost overall revenue growth
  • Market to existing contractors, dealers, and customers

After the materials distributor agreed to the plan, Gerent began putting it into action via a Quick Start implementation. Within three weeks, Gerent had established the project’s scope and milestones, tailored the Sales Cloud to suit the company’s unique needs, conducted two demos, integrated company feedback, and deployed the finalized solution. 

As a result, the materials distributor achieved its initial goal of implementing a consolidated, silo-free sales and marketing platform. But rather than marking the end of a partnership, that initial achievement set the groundwork for even more collaboration.


An Extended Partnership to Pursue Automation and Efficiency

In October, the distributor reached out to Gerent for help in automating a few time-consuming processes. The first was sample management; originally, the company’s team had to spend hours manually entering tracking numbers into an Excel spreadsheet and sending notification emails to recipients. 

But with Gerent’s help, the distributor implemented the process within Salesforce via ZenKraft, an Appexchange package that interfaces with UPS and FedEx systems. Immediately, time spent on data entry dropped to almost zero — with ZenKraft, the team could automatically send tracking numbers to clients and produce internal reports on sample delivery.

Gerent applied a similar automation-forward approach to the organization's certification process. Before the company’s digital transformation, its administrative team needed to design certifications for its continuing education initiatives in Microsoft Word and manually send the documents out whenever enrollees finished a course. The process was time-consuming and frequently diverted resources away from other, more operation-critical tasks. 

Automation provided an answer. Gerent implemented Conga, a document generation package that could simplify the certification process. Rather than manually designing each certification and sending individual emails, the distributor could customize a pre-set template with each person’s name, training date, and instructor. This new process cut the team’s invested time down from hours to minutes.

The efficiency, collaboration, and alignment gains that the materials distributor reaped from Salesforce are undeniable. With Gerent’s help, the company was able to establish a process for nurturing market-qualified leads, break down operational silos, and — most importantly — maintain its competitive presence as one of America’s foremost providers of high-quality roof and wall-building solutions.

Contact Gerent today to learn how we can help your business achieve its ideal future state!


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