About FCI Management

FCI develops and implements energy and water efficiency solutions for corporate, residential, commercial, and industrial clients, public and private schools, universities, and government and municipal agencies. Their focus is on marketing innovative technologies and energy efficiency strategies that lower energy costs for consumers, heighten the security of energy and water supply, and improve the quality of the environment by reducing the carbon footprint.
 

Unifying an Energy Solutions Provider Under The Salesforce Platform

Overview:

• Legacy systems would not allow the growth FCI anticipated.
• Managing multiple, disconnected systems caused disruption and delays in day-to-day activities.
• No reports & dashboards to show sales, productivity, work orders, and other company KPIs.
• Corrao Group’s Managed Service Agreement provides FCI with ongoing Salesforce support.

Combining Disconnected Systems into One Integrated Platform

Similar to many organizations, FCI had a homegrown CRM system for the entire company that was built and managed by one person. An ongoing issue was that as the company grew, the system was not updated to keep up with updated business processes. There was no real-time reporting to provide decision-makers with instant access to their KPIs to make decisions. Managers had to navigate through multiple tabs in order to compile key data points. After a few years, a 3rd party built a new system to handle FCI’s requirements while managing their sub-contractors. While this new system helped FCI run its business, it created a separate system that employees needed to log into. Managing millions of dollars in contracts across thousands of customers, FCI knew they needed an all-in-one solution.

The Corrao Group was introduced to FCI with the initial requirement of setting up Salesforce Sales Cloud. With the main goal of consolidating multiple systems into one, Sales Cloud was customized to FCI’s business processes. The following Salesforce objects were customized to FCI’s business:

• Leads - Essentially an “online business card”, Leads contain information about a new prospect, including email, phone number, company, and other custom data points. Leads are not shared with sales reps until they’ve been qualified and show more interest in FCI’s services and products.
• Contacts - Once Leads are qualified, they become Contacts. These records contain more information about customers required by FCI’s sales team in order to move forward through the pipeline. They also can include contract information for reps to instantly access within the Contact record.
• Opportunities - A way to track deal and contract information, Opportunities display key information about the deal that can also be reported on in real-time. Powered by the deal’s custom stages, users can view in real-time the progress of the deal and what’s being done next, and by whom.
• Accounts - A parent object to Contacts and Opportunities, Accounts track information at the organizational/company level. These were crucial to FCI in order to track chains, subsidiaries, departments, and similar groupings.

With the number of prospects and customers that FCI engaged with, duplicates were another problem from previous systems. Corrao Group implemented Salesforce deduplication tools set up to control and reduce duplicates. If employees were entering what seems to be a potential duplicate, notifications automatically pop up atop the screen in real-time, linking them to the record they are potentially duplicating. Salesforce workflows were implemented to automate FCI’s custom business processes, helping reps stay on track with daily tasks while accelerating the sales process. For FCI, workflows help automatically update certain fields across the objects listed above, send out email notifications, and create tasks for the next employee to begin their job in the cycle. When certain criteria are met (a certain Opportunity is moved to the next stage), a grouping of actions is automatically triggered (tasks created for the next rep to complete their specific job).

After the initial deployment of Salesforce Sales Cloud, FCI and Corrao Group connected again for a data migration project with a 3rd party company they work with. The 3rd party was a utility company that provided retail electricity and natural gas to consumers in the Northeast. Acting as FCI’s operations system, the 3rd party was replaced by Salesforce to function identically, allowing for more flexibility and customization for their business processes.

In order to ensure Salesforce was both tracking and providing value, standard reports and dashboards were created. A sales pipeline report was created to track Opportunities as they progressed through the sales cycle. With stages custom to FCI’s business, sales reps and owners can see all active deals in real-time with key data such as the owner, amount, next steps, source, and more. Activity reports were created to provide an overview of all tasks being worked on and other events happening within the company. Within the report view, all activities are organized by the owner and show important data such as start/end dates, notes, and current status (open, worked on, completed).

Automatic & Continuous Data Flow into Salesforce

FCI works with a fortune 500 company for projects including data for power savings, installation, QA, and customer surveys. After Salesforce was up and running for FCI, Corrao Group engaged in a new project to connect this system to Salesforce. Parameters were mapped and encoded between Salesforce and the other system and are constantly automatically updated to ensure data is always flowing into Salesforce on a weekly basis. With security being a high priority, ongoing audits are actively checking for any issues.

After the initial connection was established between the other system and Salesforce, FCI required a managed services package. Corrao Group and FCI signed a 40-hour-per-month agreement for 12 months for ongoing system support and maintenance. This continuous engagement ensured all of FCI’s systems were always functioning as they should, especially when new business processes required updates to be made.

Ongoing Support

Four years after the first Salesforce implementation project, FCI requested Salesforce updates to support their new processes for a second tier. To support this expansion, Corrao Group created new record types for accounts and opportunities, products, price books, and invoices. Conga Composer, an automated on-brand document generator was set up and also customized to support the second tier. Pre-approved templates were created to generate FCI’s assessment contract for sending for signature to customers. Invoice documents were also set up to take information from records in Salesforce, and automatically place them on one-lick generated documents sent out to customers.

To this day, FCI and Corrao Group have connected in nine Salesforce projects, with the current engagement of a managed service project for 50 hours a month for one year. During this ongoing engagement, Corrao Group continues to meet with FCI weekly to discuss new requirements as their business grows. With three major Salesforce feature releases per year, the systems are constantly changing and managed services are the most effective way to grow with the platform.

About Corrao Group

 

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,050+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,150+ Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2! Over the years, we have been using our experience to help digitally transform the consumer goods industry. As our main industry focus, we are proud to be on the CG Cloud Partner Advisory Board, in addition to being the exclusive US launch partner of the Salesforce CG Cloud Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Pilot.