Success Story: AIE Solutions
Twice as Efficient, Twice as Profitable
About the Client
AIE Solutions is a telecommunications reseller focused on providing world-class customer service and perfect-fit solutions to their clients. If telecommunications makes you think of confusing contracts and being placed on hold repeatedly, you’re not alone. That’s why since their founding, AIE has saved their clients more than 1.3 million hours of valuable time NOT spent on burdensome admin tasks, connectivity troubleshooting, and billing issues. Since everyone deserves best-in-class service, it was important for AIE to reach as many clients as they could, but they needed help developing a plan to grow their customer base.
About the Challenge
In order to grow, AIE had two main challenges to overcome: how to qualify leads and how to track their efforts so they could act on them effectively while honing their process.
Most of the prospects that came their way weren’t very useful - inaccurate company details, out of date contact information, missing service needs, and duplicates. Sales Managers were spending too much time chasing down information to fill in the gaps. There was no official process to help them know when a prospect was qualified and since they were tracking their efforts in SmartSheets, when they did qualify a prospect, it had to be manually added to Salesforce to pursue in earnest. Without consistent tracking there was no way to calculate ROI on all this work.
AIE was already using Salesforce Sales Cloud to automate and streamline their back-office processes and were thrilled with the benefits it offered them. Why not see if they could leverage that power to boost their customer reach too?
Who and What Saved the Day
Enter Canvas Cloud - a Salesforce consulting partner specializing in both technology and business process who is known for going the extra mile to achieve success for their clients (much like AIE does!). During scoping conversations, what really sold AIE on working with Canvas Cloud on a solution to their prospecting challenge was that Canvas Cloud and AIE were going to be partners in success. Acknowledging the importance of AIE’s contributions to project success set the stage for a strong relationship.
“We love that our relationship with Canvas Cloud is so collaborative. We actually look forward to our meetings together.”
Canvas Cloud’s first step was to have AIE walk them through their existing processes from start to finish. It became clear that leveraging Leads in Salesforce would be the way to go. Canvas Cloud helped AIE identify which information was vital for a Sales Manager to make successful conversions and incorporated those fields into Paths to help teams be more efficient in gathering data. Once they realized just how huge their pool of Leads was, they established a cadence for when to do outreach, how many times, and which types. This let them see what worked - and what didn’t - and continue to iterate on their approach.
AIE and Canvas Cloud continued work on their solution - analyzing data and gathering team feedback to help guide their steps. As they progressed, they leveraged AppExchange solutions like ZoomInfo and DataGroomr to help fill in their Lead information and deduplicate their data. They were even able to test out some unique theories around group goals and call sprints - and use data to prove they worked. (They were able to double the number of calls they made without doubling their staff!) Before they knew it, they were a lean, mean Lead Qualification machine!
“Canvas Cloud takes our wild ideas and fleshes them out. They ask the right questions to make sure we implement the best version of our concepts and that it fits in with everything else we’ve built.”
Ultimate Outcome
“We couldn’t have gotten as much value out of Salesforce without a strong partner like Canvas Cloud.”
What was the end result of this partnership between AIE, Canvas Cloud, and Salesforce? Doubled revenue for AIE. They knew they were missing out on growth opportunities but were surprised by what their new processes and further leveraging Salesforce could accomplish. They became so efficient at qualifying Leads and handing them off to Sales Managers for successful conversions that they expanded with a new team entirely devoted to Lead Qualification to continue chasing that growth. AIE’s business is booming, staff are happier and more efficient, and more customers are receiving top-notch telecommunications service. It's a win-win-win.
