Amp up Channel Partners in Collaborative eCommerce Portal
Learn how this major electrical distributor leveraged the power of Salesforce Community Cloud, resulting in a 99% partner adoption rate and a significant uptick in sales, reaching record heights.
The Story
Background
Our client is an industry-leading consolidator of electrical distributors with more than 600 locations from coast to coast. They supply and manage large catalogs of data, and warehouse and sell products for global distribution. The company specializes in electrical products and services for residential, commercial, industrial, and solar projects.
Challenge
The client’s legacy portal and eCommerce site were outdated, inefficient, and not mobile responsive. Their service system did not have robust functionality for collaboration among channel partners. With a large network of 600+ profit centers to maintain, the client’s antiquated and complicated manual processes were taking a toll on overall sales. The client’s partner network was hindered by their slow and inefficient quoting process. Partners were reluctant to work with the client’s outdated portal system, and therefore resorted to producing quotes for end customers manually by paper or email. This resulted in a disjoined and confusing customer experience. Trifecta’s challenge was to develop a portal solution that streamlined the client’s business processes, simplified the user experience for profit centers, encouraged partner engagement, and increased customer satisfaction.
Trifecta is an invaluable business partner to [us], practically an extension to our team. Thank you for always being willing to support us and making the portal launch a success; we couldn't have done it without you.
Our Work
Strategy
Trifecta’s team built a custom eCommerce solution on the Salesforce platform, with shopping cart capabilities utilizing a custom-built application. We leveraged Community Cloud to bring in data from clients, such as blueprints, bids, and specifications. The use of site templates helped maintain a consistent user experience for end customers, but also simplified the process for distributors to configure and uniquely brand their own eCommerce sites with preferred colors and images. In addition, Trifecta’s team designed the portals to give partners access to critical product, service, and customer information, which ideally would assist them in improving overall business. In subsequent phases of this project, Trifecta worked closely with the client to develop several reports to further enhance partner and customer insights. Trifecta also assisted the client in developing a mobile app and streamlining their distributors’ inventory through a vendor-managed inventory (VMI) process, which allows individual distributors to view their current inventory status and self-scan product in and out to update that inventory in real time.
The Results
Results:
Trifecta’s solution was a responsive eCommerce site that maximized user adoption, enhanced the customer experience, and increased sales. To date, 99% of the electrical distributor’s profit centers have enabled their personalized portal. With this new ability for customer data to reside in one unified system, our client (and their 600+ distributor partners) now have a 360-degree view of their end customer.
Partner portal users, whose numbers are in the tens of thousands, now have the ability to configure their profit-center settings, have access to product and pricing information, can interact directly with customers, produce quotes, download files, view statements, manage jobs, create new orders, and pay invoices. By streamlining these business processes, our client has reduced the use of paper bids and enabled real-time interaction between manufacturer, channel partner sales and service teams, and end customers. The ease of these partner portals and improved customer experience enabled our client’s eCommerce revenue to double in only six months.
Subsequent enhancements related to VMI has served to further support this sales growth, as it empowers partner sales representatives to spend less time on-site counting inventory, less time on the phone with their service teams placing replenishment orders, and more time pursuing new sales opportunities.
Following the update to the client's eCommerce portal sites, they experienced record growth, doubling their sales revenue in only 6 months.