ModularWalls set for next leap of growth

ModularWalls is an Australian manufacturing success story that originated from a stroke of ingenuity by founder Nick Holden. In 2004, Holden was prevented from building a brick wall outside his house due to council guidelines. He could have given up on his plans, but chose instead to design a different type of wall and invented an entirely new product category in the process.

Almost immediately, Holden began taking orders from those who saw his wall and wanted one for themselves. A later appearance on the ABC’s The New Inventors show saw the business truly take off, and it hasn't stopped since.

ModularWalls now serves residential and commercial customers across Australia, New Zealand, USA, and Europe. The company is also growing year-on-year with Salesforce.

ModularWalls turned to Salesforce eight years ago. Its previous quotation system had become cumbersome and simple actions like adding products to a quote were too time consuming. This issue was compounded by a spike in customer inquiries, making it difficult to stay on top of customer relationships and maintain responsiveness.

Rather than risk missing out on a huge opportunity for growth, the business sought a solution that would help to streamline lead management and quoting. It also wanted to enable sales reps to work off the same data in real-time.

“We were still a small business at that point, but ready to jump to a mid-size business and looking at the trends around us, it became obvious that we needed to evolve our use of technology and automation,” said Holden.

ModularWalls made the decision to implement Salesforce as its single source of truth. Adoption was initially challenging, but after experiencing how much easier it was to manage leads and quotes, employees hopped onboard.

“We put a lot of focus on training and refining our processes so that Salesforce helps our employees work more efficiently,” said Kyle Stewart, IT Director. “It now gives us a competitive edge and helps us retain people who are highly skilled and in demand.”

ModularWalls is now using Salesforce to drive its processes and provide a seamless experience to customers and partners. For customers, this experience includes personalised acquisition and nurture journeys powered by Marketing Cloud as well as a new self-service portal. Known as the ModularWalls Neighbourhood, the portal runs on Experience Cloud and allows customers to create their own quotes. It also leverages Salesforce Maps to help customers find trade partners in their area.

In just eight weeks of being live, the portal has helped to increase lead volume by 40% and increase conversion from 25% to almost 60%. “Not only are we generating more leads, but we have halved the time our sales team spent quoting and given them more time to help those customers who know what they want and are ready to move forward,” said Holden.

Half of ModularWalls sales are indirect so when customers are ready to buy, they're often referred to a partner. Even so, the service they receive reflects on ModularWalls’ business and so it helps partners provide a positive experience to the end customer. It has set up a partner portal on Experience Cloud where partners can access a range of tools that help them grow and manage their business.

The portal is used to push new leads out to partners and includes resources like a streamlined quoting tool. Partners can also opt-in to access Marketing Cloud and run their own campaigns. In the future, the portal will be extended to manage training and onboarding and enable partners to place orders and manage dispatch.

“Ultimately what we’re creating is an enterprise-level solution that our partners can use to build their business,” said Holden. “It will also help to deepen our relationships with partners and support them to move through our different levels of accreditation.”

ModularWalls is continuing to grow rapidly and attributes a large part of this to Salesforce. It has not only improved sales and the customer experience, but made it much easier to scale. For instance, Service Cloud allows it to provide efficient support and close cases fast. It also provides ModularWalls a new stream of leads through instant SMS chat that it didn’t have access to previously. ModularWalls has more recently used Salesforce Knowledge to build out a series of FAQs that support faster onboarding of sales reps and partners.

“Scalability is key to any small business, and so when you are investing in technology you have to think about whether it will scale to meet the needs of your business as it grows,” said Holden. “In our minds, Salesforce is like another employee for us, working 24/7 and crunching our data to enable the business to scale while providing a great customer experience.”

Holden shared that this scalability has proved invaluable during COVID-19. The pandemic has driven a surge of growth for the business due to increases in home improvement projects and government infrastructure projects. ModularWalls has had to expand manufacturing capacity to keep up with demand and is already preparing for another wave of interest as its set to be featured on Australian DIY show The Block.

Next on the business’ roadmap is using Tableau CRM to unlock new insights from its vast data. It wants to make smarter decisions about how it allocates leads to partners and better pinpoint what drives conversion in order to optimise marketing journeys.

More broadly, ModularWalls is continuing to innovate and build out its product range. Soon, it plans to introduce sustainable walls built using plastic bottles. These will be launched in the commercial space first and substantially reduce the use of materials like concrete. They will also prevent millions of bottles ending up as landfill.

Holden said that when the walls are ready, they will use Salesforce to get the word out. “Quality and innovation is important, but it is also a matter of who markets best. We’re in a strong position and don’t need to look for another partner to support our next leap of growth. We’re invested in Salesforce and it’s empowering us every day,” said Holden.