Sonova helps more people enjoy the delight of hearing with Salesforce
Discover how smarter processes and richer data boost sales of hearing instruments.
Close your eyes and listen to the world around you. Perhaps you can hear a song that reminds you of a good time, the laughter of loved ones, or the wind rustling through the trees. Maybe you can hear a car alarm, a baby crying, or the ping of a microwave.
Being able to hear doesn’t just help us enjoy life. Sounds can warn us of danger, grab our attention, or create a shared experience. That’s why global hearing care company, Sonova, is on a mission to help more people hear better.
Headquartered in Switzerland, Sonova holds 2,000 patents and design rights for innovative audiological solutions. It owns big-name brands such as Phonak, Unitron, Hansaton, and AudioNova, and works with a network of partners to find a solution for every type of hearing loss.
The company’s 16,500-plus employees operate across more than 100 countries, striving to help more people find the right hearing solution through Sonova’s consumer brands or via hearing care practitioners.
Just as every consumer has unique hearing requirements, Sonova understands that every hearing care practitioner is working to achieve their own ambitions and growth goals. And with Salesforce, it’s unlocking richer insights to give B2B customers the best possible experience, from marketing support to better serving customers.
1. Packing more punch with targeted marketing campaigns
The partnership between Sonova and Salesforce kicked off in 2009, so when the hearing care company wanted to tailor the platform to accelerate its business strategy, it knew it already had the right solution to meet its needs.
“Salesforce is always one step ahead. It anticipates customer needs and develops innovative new features to maximise every opportunity,” revealed Marcello Thomaz, Senior Manager, CRM Business, Sonova. “We wanted to establish best practices in our wholesale business and tailor the solution to meet the needs of specific business units.”
One focus area was optimising marketing campaigns to educate customers, nurture leads, and create greater brand awareness. To give the wholesale business better insight into campaign performance, the team needed to connect Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, and CRM Analytics.
While Sonova already used out-of-the-box functionality to monitor customer engagement, it wanted to tap into richer analytics to understand the impact of campaigns on customer success.
Ian Heatley, Senior Sales Analytics Manager, built a dashboard in CRM Analytics that captures data from at least six sources and displays it in a single dashboard. Staff can monitor KPIs such as how many leads were captured or the win rate.
To make sure campaigns hit the mark with the right audience, the team creates targeted mailing lists of customers based on complex criteria. Communications are then automatically sent out by Marketing Cloud, with impact data and customer behaviour tracked in Salesforce.
“Segmentation means we can target the right people with the right message at the right time. By displaying data in a visually appealing way, Salesforce makes data more accessible to everyone,” added Heatley.
That means staff need minimal training to get productive with data. But to help them work smarter in Marketing Cloud, Sonova is planning to create custom training modules for staff using Sales Enablement.
2. Maximising incremental growth
When it comes to sales, Sonova’s wholesale business uses Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to improve performance and have better conversations with customers.
When the B2B marketing team identifies a hot lead, they pass it to sales to convert into an opportunity and close the deal.
Dashboards score customers based on their buying potential and wallet share, which shows staff where to focus their efforts. With 360-degree visibility of customers and opportunities tracked in Sales Cloud, sales reps can make sure they’re visiting the right customers and having more valuable conversations to help grow the business.
They then use Salesforce Maps to plan their routes and capture meeting notes directly in Salesforce. Sales Cloud is also integrated with Microsoft Outlook, which allows the team to better manage their schedule.
To promote both up- and cross-selling, Salesforce predicts the buying potential of each customer for each product, and identifies which new products a hearing care practitioner will be most interested in. This boosts incremental growth with existing customers.
By integrating marketing with sales, the company can track how successful each product launch was and which customers went on to make a purchase. This then automatically triggers the next best action for the sales team.
“Salesforce is a one-stop-shop for visibility. We can drill down into anything in Analytics Studio,” said Heatley.
3. Helping hearing care practitioners better serve customers
Sonova prides itself on building strong customer relationships, proactively reaching out at least once a month with new offers, to capture feedback on whether products are functioning properly, and to learn more about customer challenges.
To help hearing care practitioners better serve their customres, the company provides full support including training and marketing materials to make sure the customer’s sales team is confident recommending products to consumers. They can also access self-help articles in Knowledge Base and frequently asked questions on the website.
Sonova handles customer complaints and repairs to ensure cases are resolved as quickly as possible. When a customer service agent needs to reach out to a customer about their repair, a ticket is raised in Service Cloud to speed up the process. In the future, the company plans to create a single dashboard to track the status of repairs at a glance.
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4. Driving a data-driven culture
As the company continues its transformation, analytics are playing an increasingly important role in shaping the business.
“The beauty of CRM Analytics is that we can display data in different ways for different people. Some can interpret findings from a table of numbers, while others need to visualise it to spot trends,” explained Heatley. “But what matters is we’re working from a single source of truth.”
This helps to establish KPIs across the business, from sales and marketing to senior management level. The commercial excellence strategy, for example, is underpinned by Salesforce analytics.
Insights around the sales funnel, lead management, retention, and where the company is making gains are captured and pulled into a report. Findings are then presented at meetings with the CEO or Vice Principle of Sales, and if the team need a printable report, they can generate one at the tap of a button.
“CRM Analytics means we’re not scrabbling for numbers. We have accurate and comprehensive data at our fingertips on a scale that wasn’t possible before,” Heatley added.
In the future, he plans to create an analytics hub with 12 core KPIs to help measure performance, identify opportunities to meet with customers, monitor budgets, and reduce complaint handling speeds, and to ensure sales reps are prioritising the right customers, for example.
Traffic light colour coding will help staff to see where action is needed to meet their targets, with drill down capabilities to learn more about each KPI. This will help both sales reps manage their work, and regional managers monitor how their territories are performing.
With Salesforce, Sonova can work smarter to grow its business and demonstrate that it’s invested in customer success. It’s not just implementing more efficient processes; it’s actively monitoring the impact on sales and customer experience to identify areas for improvement.
“Salesforce helps us put the customer at the heart of the business. It’s not just a great product, I know I can reach out to the team for advice at any time as we continue to optimise our platform,” said Ohmann.
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