Migration to Salesforce

Product Innovation Company

The customer was using a CRM platform that did not match the company’s ambitions for expansion and development of prospecting and sales policies. In addition, with the challenges posed by Covid-19, the company needed more than ever to migrate to a platform that would better meet the company’s needs and would integrate all units, allowing them to work together and collaborate remotely.

Challenges

The existing CRM that the company's Prospecting and Account Management team was using did not allow extensive customizations in terms of business process automation, custom objects creation, third-party systems integration, and more. The system also did not support page layout and record type customization and did not offer the variety of custom reports and dashboards that the Salesforce CRM would. In addition, the existing CRM allowed users to only access GDrive folders which were in a subfolder of the CRM’s GDrive folder. Therefore, we suggested that the customer migrates from the existing CRM to Salesforce's CRM in order to allow more customization and alignment of the software in line with the company's strategy. The transition had to go smoothly without disrupting the team's work, and for that reason, all the legacy data from the old CRM system had to be seamlessly transferred to the new Salesforce software. The most challenging aspect of this journey was to apply the design thinking approach to an already established sales process and change the mindset of the prospecting and sales teams.

Solution

Apt Systems’ experts met with the stakeholders to examine their existing approach and practices in order to better understand what is important for them and what makes them unique. Based on the results of the process, business and data analysis the team designed and proposed a Salesforce solution and how the integration could be implemented.

Once the proposed solution was approved, we began with the design and implementation of custom functionalities, following best practices and highest security standards. We utilized a PHP middleware application for the integration between Salesforce, JIRA, Confluence, Redmine and GSuite. We recommended the PHP app because it allows a centralized flow of information between the systems and serves as a bible for the current and any future implementations. The team also created user-friendly reports improving the reporting functionality of the previous CRM. Leveraging our Salesforce expertise we were also able to migrate the legacy CRM reporting database to Salesforce so that users can enjoy a seamless transition. We developed a custom solution using Data Loader on the back end in order to mix and match data properly before it is inserted into Salesforce. Using custom components we have extended the functionality of the out of the box Opportunity object, making the user journey during the deal information entry smoother.

The digital transformation and optimization required a lot of changes and if they were introduced all at once, the company would have suffered a slowdown and the stakeholders would now be able to obtain end-user feedback and adjust the implementation accordingly. Thus, the most logical approach was to adopt the agile methodology, which would ensure that we have a smooth product-delivery process without release delays.

Results

Designed and implemented an intuitive solution that corresponds to the new vision and strategy of the company

Integrated all external systems such as Jira, Confluence, Redmine, GSuite with Salesforce

Achieved a higher level of customization and automation

Increased sales, improved tracking of KPIs and better customer experience

Improved efficiency and collaboration between team members

Better activity capture and task management and improved forecasting and predictability

Quick Facts

Duration

3.5 months

Technology Stack

JavaScript

Apex

Lightning Components

Salesforce Metadata API

PHP

Git

Redmine

Declarative Tools

Team

1 QA

1 PM

10 Developers