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GlobalSign

“Revenue Cloud, with its integrated CPQ and Billing components, gives us endless flexibility and a huge range of options.”

RUTGER VAN HECKE, ATLAS PRODUCTION MANAGER, GLOBALSIGN

500 Employees
Salesforce Client Since 2012

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GlobalSign unleashes the power of Revenue Cloud

When we visit a High Street store, the identity of the retailer is usually crystal clear. But buying online – and the sharing of so much data that this entails – requires us to rely on others to provide the confidence we need that it’s safe to proceed with our transaction.

In fact, this simple principle applies every time we provide our details online, to anyone or anything – even when our smart meter sends a reading to our energy provider.

GlobalSign is one of an elite group of specialist technology businesses that deliver the trust and security that are the essential foundations of today’s vast network of data connectivity – the Internet of Everything (IoE) – that is transforming billions of lives around the world. Its solutions authenticate and safeguard the digital identities of Government organisations, businesses, people, services, and devices that need to securely access and exchange data on a vast scale in our tech-driven world.

GlobalSign is the fourth largest certification authority in the world, trusted by global brands like Microsoft, Ford, Netflix, and Airbnb. Its 500 employees are geographically dispersed, with clusters in the United States, UK, Europe, and Asia. The company prides itself on its innovation, anticipating the evolution of the IoE and the needs of customers, developing solutions ahead of time.

Playing such a pivotal role in a heavily regulated industry, GlobalSign’s products and services, as well as its own processes and procedures, are scrutinised and audited to ensure the quality, legitimacy, and security of its activities. As a result, the company only works with world-class partners, selected for shared values and professional standards, like Salesforce, a relationship that began almost 10 years ago.

We talked to GlobalSign’s Atlas Production Manager, Rutger Van Hecke, about GlobalSign’s plans for the future and how Salesforce solutions, in particular Revenue Cloud, are transforming its ability to scale at pace and with confidence.

“Revenue Cloud, with its integrated CPQ and Billing components, gives us endless flexibility and a huge range of options. Comparing our previous system with the capabilities within Revenue Cloud was mind blowing, you can see just why Salesforce is the market leader.”

Rutger Van Hecke, Atlas Production Manager, GlobalSign

Building on a successful formula, while always embracing innovation

For almost a decade Salesforce has been a core business platform for GlobalSign, helping the company deliver growth, build a reputation for innovation, and develop new products and services that anticipate the future needs of its markets and customers.

When GlobalSign launched the Atlas project, a multi-year plan to create its next generation, high-speed, cloud certificate management engine, it positioned Salesforce at the heart of its plans. Atlas is automating the creation and distribution of digital certificates, enabling its customers to buy at scale and pace, reflecting today’s fast-moving commercial imperatives.

“The company had used Salesforce very successfully and our original version had been highly customised for our needs,” explained Van Hecke. “So, when Atlas was conceived as our future platform for everything, we decided we needed a new version of Salesforce at its core.

“We’re a high-tech business that sells high-tech products that you can’t touch or see because they’re all in the cloud. But what our customers can see and feel is great service, so our goal is to work closely with our customers, provide that great service to them, and to build loyalty so that they come back to us time and time again.

“We’re super flexible about how our customers can use our products and we can tailor associated services so that we fulfil their needs precisely. Essentially, we provide a very personal service on a very large scale.”

Salesforce is the glue that binds GlobalSign’s sales and service efforts together, integrating product, vetting, and sales teams, providing the data and automation to build the right package for the customer, while enabling expert salespeople to use every touchpoint to deliver a unique customer experience each time.

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Utilising 360-degree insights to drive sales and service

While GlobalSign continues its journey of transition from its legacy platform to its Atlas-powered future, Salesforce continues to play an integral role in its present.

It provides a comprehensive, 360-degree view of customers, enabling sales teams to nurture and convert leads using Sales Cloud, and enabling support teams using Service Cloud to deliver the quality customer experience that encourages loyalty and repeat business.

“In the future, customers will increasingly self-serve and manage their products using our Atlas portal,” explained Van Hecke. “But we need a balance between opportunities for self-service and opportunities for our people to add value, to guide customers and to help them to build the best solutions for them.

“Salesforce provides the data, the insights, and the history to enable us to provide a high quality, personalised service with lots of advice, expertise, and support, which, in a complex, high tech industry like ours, is essential and what distinguishes us from our competition.”

And while the transition to Atlas continues, MuleSoft is ensuring that all GlobalSign’s systems, applications, and data are fully integrated and connected, enhancing the 360-degree view and ensuring that its teams are on the same page and acting in unison.

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Automating quoting and invoicing for speed, accuracy, and scalability

As our reliance on connectivity and data sharing permeates more and more aspects of life and work, so the scope and scale of the need for GlobalSign’s solutions grows too.

And with today’s technology inspired businesses needing more and more digital certificates to enable their activities to flourish and to capitalise on opportunities, GlobalSign knew that, in a highly specialised and technical industry, automation was essential to achieve the speed, efficiency, and accuracy of its quoting and billing processes.

When Van Hecke joined the Atlas project, he realised that GlobalSign’s existing quoting and billing solution could not deliver the speed and scale required to achieve the company’s long-term goals.

“We want to be able to tailor the way we sell our solutions precisely around the needs of customers and we were facing the prospect of our existing technology imposing serious limitations on us,” explained Van Hecke. “With such a complex range of pricing options, configurations, and scales, the accuracy of the final cost calculation is vital too, for both our customers and our business model too.

“Atlas is the platform that will drive our long-term future, so we took the strategically important decision to move to Revenue Cloud to provide the pricing and billing engine that will effectively drive our bottom line.

“Revenue Cloud, with its integrated CPQ and Billing components, gives us endless flexibility and a huge range of options, something Salesforce really excels in. Comparing our previous system with all the capabilities within Revenue Cloud was mind blowing, you can see just why Salesforce is the market leader.”

Learn more about Revenue Cloud.

Building trust, confidence, and closer relationships with customers

Salesforce CPQ makes GlobalSign’s huge range of product and solution options fast and easy to navigate for Van Hecke’s teams, who have become trusted advisors, building a complete package containing everything the customer needs.

They do this by accessing searchable catalogues, with pre-configured or customised combinations of products, with prompts to additional products that could add value for the customer, as well as accurate, up-to-date pricing, including discount triggers. The final quote is automatically generated in a smart, branded proposal including payment schedules and terms and conditions.

With confidence in the data, the quote can be quickly shared and approved, delighting the customer with a fast, comprehensive, and actionable response to their enquiry.

And because CPQ and Billing are two sides of the same coin, the finance department has exactly the same information, prompting accurate, on-time invoicing to the agreed schedule, delivering certainty of income and cash flow, smoothing business, resource, and financial planning.

With a combination of a highly professional, fast, and streamlined buying experience – and administrative accuracy and control – comes trust and confidence, fewer issues to resolve, recurring business, and closer relationships with customers.

“Take the Billing aspect for example,” explained Van Hecke. “This isn’t just about getting an invoice right, in Revenue Cloud this opens up many opportunities to communicate and build service touchpoints with the customer, enhancing our relationship with them.”

Customer retention is the most efficient and profitable form of revenue, and with CPQ and Billing integrated into Revenue Cloud, Salesforce ensures that businesses minimise churn and maximise the volume and value of existing income streams.

Enabling self-service and opportunities to provide advice and guidance

With the CPQ engine, GlobalSign’s sales teams can give customers everything they want, with speed and accuracy. The single Salesforce platform captures the whole customer journey on one page, how and when the lead was created, how the journey developed, the quote, any additional support provided, and the invoice history - it’s all there in one place.

“I’m very proud and happy that we made the move,” concluded Van Hecke. “We have a highly skilled internal technical team moving our legacy systems to Atlas, and we had to work to a very tight timetable to move over to Revenue Cloud. But with the support of Salesforce specialist partner Polsource and by using Salesforce DX to give our developers the tools they needed, we did it and it’s really paying off.

“Our sales teams are concluding more deals faster because it’s much easier to construct and customise the quote. And the dashboards in Salesforce really allow us to dive deeper into where our revenue is coming from, and which products are driving growth. And if that wasn’t enough, Revenue Cloud itself is more attractively priced than our previous solution.

“When the Atlas project is more advanced and we have all our customers onboard from our legacy platform, self-serving and using the engine to create their own quotations, with support from our teams when they need it, the benefits we are enjoying now will be multiplied many times over. Salesforce is such a strong product, offering endless flexibility and ease of use. These are the firm foundations which GlobalSign will build on over the next decade.”

GlobalSign’s digital certificates provide the trust and confidence we need to share our data with the Internet of Everything. With Revenue Cloud, the company is building a powerful growth engine by enabling its customers around the world to self-serve and its people to provide great personal service. Van Hecke concluded: “Salesforce provides the data, the insights, and the history to enable us to provide a high quality, personalised service with lots of advice, expertise, and support, which, in a complex, high-tech industry like ours, is essential and what distinguishes us from our competition.”