The Challenge
Cobham Mission Systems (CMS), which operates in several global locations, is experiencing rapid growth. With legacy systems lacking an enterprise and customer 360 perspective, CMS needed a modern customer relationship management (CRM) platform that would scale with their growing business. With disparate legacy systems, they wanted a solution that would bring sales visibility and reporting consistency across their entire organization. The COVID-19 pandemic added urgency to this project as the entire sales team was working remotely.
The CMS sales cycle is multi-year and complex, with inside and outside sales teams operating globally. The company wanted to achieve “one source of truth” for sales management, opportunity tracking, customer engagement, and forecasting. Because their historical customer and sales data was stored in several enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, two separate instances of Microsoft Dynamics, and various data files, creating a company-wide sales pipeline and forecast was an arduous process. Another challenge of this project was the tight timeline: the company wanted to roll out Salesforce to its global team in less than two months.
CMS selected Spinnaker Support as the best implementation partner based on its aggressive agile approach and timeline, experienced team, and combined service offering of implementation and long-term support. The project included the standardization of sales processes across business units and geographies to facilitate consolidated pipeline tracking, executive reporting, and sales, inventory and operations planning processes (SIOP).
“Because of the success we’ve experienced with Spinnaker Support, we are looking to move faster with adding new functionality. We have a lot of confidence in achieving our Salesforce goals because of our great relationship with Spinnaker Support”
– Dione Fultz, Cobham Missions Systems
The Approach
The CMS Salesforce project owners understood the importance of executive buy-in and user adoption to achieve a great ROI. To initiate their internal needs analysis process, the CMS team performed a requirements project in early 2020 to capture and document existing and future objectives. Throughout this exercise, CMS focused on the standardization and automation of critical business processes across the sales organization.
When the Sales Cloud implementation project began in late 2020, Spinnaker Support and CMS conducted discovery sessions to validate and prioritize the deliverables on the project “wish list” that resulted from the earlier internal analysis project. This process included interactive sessions with key users and stakeholders to verify needs and workflows. The discovery phase identified the essential requirements for the deployment of Sales Cloud.
Spinnaker Support and CMS established a six-week project timeline to deliver the refined minimum viable product (MVP). This aggressive global rollout required rapid stakeholder alignment, highly engaged business change champions, and a skilled and integrated team.
The Solution
The CMS solution included:
- A single view of enterprise accounts and contacts, sourced across multiple ERP systems
- “One source of truth” for reporting and dashboarding on global pipeline
- Standardized global sales processes
- Product delivery and revenue schedule creation automation
- Multiple currency functionality
- SIOP reporting automation
- Retirement of legacy CRM systems
The implementation project included an intensive data migration exercise from existing CMS databases, which was integral to obtaining “one source of truth” for customer and prospect data. The Spinnaker Support team loaded data into Salesforce originating from three different ERP systems, Microsoft Dynamics, and various data files. CMS placed a high priority on data cleansing; this proved to be an important step for the successful implementation of Sales Cloud as the company needed one location for sales and customer data.
The final phase of the implementation project was training. Due to the pandemic and remote working status of most employees, the Spinnaker Support team trained all CMS users via webinars, topical videos, and one-on-one sessions. They continue to use video trainings for future hires to ensure quick adoption and onboarding.
The Results
The main goals of the Sales Cloud implementation project were to build a new CRM platform that would scale with CMS’s growing business and create a foundation for a customer 360° view.
Key outcomes of the implementation project:
- A single data source to analyze global sales activities across the entire company
- New strategic business conversations that were not previously possible
- Clarity of the origination of future revenue, by channel
- Reduction of over 60 hours per month needed to create and manage pipeline reporting
- Lead tracking for multi-year deal cycles up to five years
Day-to-day process improvements:
- Real-time sales metrics (previously was monthly)
- Standardization of sales vernacular and processes
- Consistent use of data fields to create reliable pipeline reports
- Increased data hygiene and forecasting accuracy
- Consolidation of historical customer data