Schneider Electric unlocks sales opportunities with Salesforce.
Learn how a Signature Success plan helped the energy specialist extract data insights in hours, not days.
With high energy prices and the global impact of climate change, energy challenges have become relevant to every consumer and business on the planet.
Schneider Electric, the leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation, aims to be part of the solution. The company’s power distribution products and energy management solutions are installed in about half the buildings in all major cities around the world. In doing so, the company aim to help its customers save or avoid 800 million tons of CO2 emissions by 2025.
As part of its mission to deliver a more sustainable future, Schneider Electric helps companies through its products and solutions to optimize energy management in homes, office buildings, infrastructure installations, and industrial operations. In addition to selling physical products, the company also provides services and remote monitoring solutions.
As Schneider Electric Chairman and CEO Jean-Pascal Tricoire said: We used to just do energy distribution. Now we can prevent issues. We can tackle building efficiency and bring predictive maintenance capabilities, so our customers don’t have to suffer problems.
To help deliver its advanced solutions, Schneider Electric relies on many partners, including Salesforce. And over the last decade, the company has put digital at the heart of its business — marketing, sales, service, commerce, and customer support.
Achieving this has required a long-term transformation — a journey that continues to this day with new digital initiatives. Given the ambitious scale of its goals, Schneider Electric recognized that it couldn’t go it alone. And who better to turn to than Salesforce’s own experts?
Here’s how Schneider Electric has worked with Salesforce Customer Success to extract maximum value from its Salesforce Customer 360 platform.
1. Enhance your CRM platform with AI tools to identify and convert sales opportunities.
Schneider Electric’s Salesforce journey started with its “One Schneider” strategy, an initiative to replace multiple vendors with a single solution shared by all employees. That has involved implementing various Salesforce solutions, including Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, which were connected to give its sales and service teams a 360-degree view of customers.
Schneider Electric has since enhanced its customer relationship management (CRM) platform with AI tools that ensure its global sales teams are laser-focused on the best opportunities.
The company used CRM Analytics to build what it calls its “digital opportunity factory.” The tool ingests data from a wide range of sources — including accounts, orders, customer assets, and even Internet of Things (IoT) data from those assets — to identify clients that may need to upgrade, modernize, or replace their systems.
Einstein Discovery analyzes that data to create predictive scores on the likelihood of converting those opportunities into sales. The tool automatically routes leads to the right people and even provides recommendations on how to progress the opportunities. As a result, sales teams have reduced their time to close by 30%.
“Everything we do — sales, support, marketing, identity, analytics — is in Salesforce. Therefore, it’s critical that we have the platform up and running 24/7.”
Akila Subramanyam
2. Extract more value from Salesforce with personalized, proactive expertise.
Schneider Electric has leaned on Salesforce Customer Success to achieve its goals faster and maximize its Salesforce investment. For example, program architects and strategic experts from Salesforce Professional Services have assisted on several initiatives, providing expert guidance and implementation best practices.
With access to this unrivaled Salesforce expertise, they are also tapping into the Professional Services team's 20-plus years of experience working with thousands of customers, enabling Schneider Electric to continue to confidently build upon Salesforce's latest technology.
The team also opted for personalized, proactive expertise with the Salesforce Signature Success Plan. Signature includes a designated Technical Account Manager (TAM), dedicated skilled Support Engineers, personalized data-driven insights, technical health reviews, proactive monitoring, and the fastest response times from Salesforce’s most skilled support engineers.
“Our Technical Account Manager is part of our team. He knows our business and its complexity inside and out. He helps to orchestrate our path forward, and escalates and pulls in the right resources — whether it’s support, analytics, or product experts — when we need them.”
Akila Subramanyam
3. Consult experts for complex data integration issues.
The company’s CRM Analytics implementation ingests external data from legacy sources and consolidates it with Salesforce data. However, the legacy data had grown complex and unwieldy, taking days to process and delaying the generation of new sales opportunities, sometimes up to a week.
Akila’s team needed a solution to achieve the company’s goal of providing the sales team with the latest data insights every five to seven hours throughout the day. With help from her Technical Account Manager and other Salesforce product team experts, the team was able to come up with a solution.
The solution to the data integration challenge involved breaking down the lengthy, single process into smaller, more manageable data flows. That included creating data prep “recipes” for the flows, running and monitoring the flows, and continually optimizing the recipes to reduce total processing time.
In addition, this solution allowed the company to leverage parallel processing capabilities, accelerating the overall process, while preventing a single flow from blocking other flows.
The result? The team reduced the run time of the end-to-end process from 40-plus hours to 5.5 hours.
Now, when sales reps get online in the morning, they are working with the latest data and insights, and targeting the most promising opportunities. And Schneider Electric can continue its mission to enable people and organizations around the globe to embrace clean, renewable energy solutions.
4. Check out Schneider Electric’s best practices for a successful CRM Analytics implementation.
Akila and her team took away the following lessons from the project:
- Do not treat CRM Analytics as a data lake. Split lengthy data ingestion processes into multiple smaller flows.
- Use only the relevant data in a data prep recipe to avoid unnecessary processing.
- Reduce maintenance overheads by promoting reusability, such as using a single dataset for a specific type of data.
- Review end-to-end designs for all implementations.
- Monitor data prep recipes to understand the impact of recipe changes and then continually optimize flows.
- Surround yourself with the Salesforce and internal experts you need to get the job done.
“We need to ensure that when sales reps get online in the morning, whether they’re in Europe, Asia, or North America, they are working with the latest data and insights.”
Akila Subramanyam
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