360° partner sales management for one of the leading electronics suppliers
Multi channel partner management for LG Electronics Germany - based on Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud
LG Electronics is a global leader and technology innovator in areas such as consumer electronics and home appliances with around 150 local offices worldwide and approximately 74,000 managers and employees.
LG's IT portfolio for the workplace and home use is marketed for Germany and Austria by the LG IT Solutions business unit based in Eschborn. As a technology leader, LG IT Solutions sets standards in the development and production of state-of-the-art monitors, projectors and notebooks. LG's ProBeam and CineBeam laser and LED projectors are among the best on the market. The IT Solutions portfolio also includes innovative cloud and medical display solutions.
The Challenge
The LG IT Business is 100% focused on partner sales. LG partners expect individual support in terms of quality, transparency, pricing and efficiency. Faced with shrinking price margins, limited product availability and, at the same time, more sensitive global supply chains, the challenge for LG IT Solutions was to move from BI-centric sales management to forward-looking, data-driven and forecast-based sales planning and 360° partner management.
Goals
Real-time partner sales, data insights and forecasts
Monthly adjusted , transparent price management, efficient sales support management
Targeted and efficient online self-service partner enquiry support with fast turnaround
Partner loyalty programme to build strong and lasting partner relationships
Exploitation of the potential to increase productivity and focus existing sales staff on the customer
With the proprietary sales BI system used so far in combination with manual Excel analyses, the challenges could neither be met comprehensively in terms of data quality and transparency nor in terms of efficiency
The Solution
LG IT Solutions decided to use the market-leading Salesforce technology.
The project focused on the implementation of the Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud to create a "single source of truth" for all partner, sales and warehouse data. A requirement of this was the definition of a multi-level account structure management in order to map the data selectably according to channels, territories, sales groups, head offices or branches.
Aggregated Tableau CRM dashboards were used to create planning functions and insight at every level and granularity.
Master Data Management was and is used to homogenise the weekly incoming sales and inventory data from over 35 partners, making the pipelines transparent and manageable.
The second phase of the project consisted of building a partner portal based on the Experience Cloud and Salesforce CMS in order to create a central point of interaction with the partners. Attached to this is a so-called partner quoting tool, which is based on 2-level opportunities,
Sales Cloud, approval processes and Experience Cloud, reduces the lead times of partner projects and monitors and forecasts partner project business and pipelines. In order to motivate partners and strengthen the partnership, a loyalty programme was set up in the partner portal, which enables the retrieval of rewards or marketing support according to the sales made via Salesforce integration functions and linked to the external points system "Wunschgutschein.de".
- Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud as the single source of truth for all partner and market data
- Introduction of Tableau CRM dashboards for comprehensive insights and planning capabilities
- Implementation of a Master Data Management (MDM) to get unified data and reports from over 35 partners
- Build a partner portal based on the Experience Cloud and Salesforce CMS to create a central place for partner interactions
- Using Tableau CRM dashboards for sales pipelines and pipeline forecasts to communicate pipeline estimates to LG headquarters and monitor and plan inventory levels
- Integration of the external reward system "Wunschgutschein.de" with automatic cooperative sales application within the partner portal
- Improve staff performance by expanding activities to standardise customer interactions and point-of-sales reports, including POS documents and images taken and submitted directly from the iPad and iPhone
The Results
The Manufacturing Cloud provides LG IT Solutions with comprehensive live transparency for all channels and at all levels. It also enables efficient and centralised sales partner management and provides employees with a single source of truth for all partner sales data. All of this leads to efficient and measurable sales team management.
The Salesforce Experience Cloud & CMS form a self-service portal for all LG IT Solutions partners and employees. This is where automated project approval and an innovative high volume, high throughput partner quoting tool came into play.
By implementing Tableau CRM, LG IT Solutions has all global and account-based drill-downs and trends, as well as relevant project pipelines and delivery forecasts always in view.
Quantitative results achieved
- Managed partners: 2,200
- Users of the partner portal: 3,300
- Customer-specific project volume p.a.: 100 million
- Partner sales transactions p.a.: 100,000
- Average project approval time: < 1h
- Significantly more detailed and faster sales evaluation
- 50 percent time saving in accounting (e.g. bonus agreements)