A Measurement of Sales Force Automation Success at WIKA Instruments Ltd.
August 27, 2008
Edited by Stacy Straczynski
Company: WIKA Instruments Ltd., the Canadian subsidiary of WIKA Alexander Wiegand GmbH & Co. KG, is a global manufacturer of electronic and mechanical pressure and temperature instrumentation. With an extensive line of pressure gauges, chemical seals, thermocouples, resistance temperature detectors (RTD's), thermowells, and associated accessories, WIKA provides a solution for any measurement task. The company's products are ideal for applications within the petrochemical, power generation, process, sanitary, medical, UHP and wastewater industries. WIKA employs 300 people in facilities located in Edmonton, AB, Oakville, ON, and Deer Park, TX. The company also maintains sales offices strategically located across Canada, as well as an
established distribution network throughout the U.S.
Challenge: With 30 outside sales executives and nearly 40 inside salespeople backed by product managers and project leaders, the sales force automation efforts by the WIKA Instruments team consisted of a "pen and paper" approach augmented by Microsoft Word and Excel call activity sheets. As the company grew, this method proved inadequate and often created incomplete sales opportunities, loss of prospective customers and reporting that was lacking.
"We basically scribbled notes on cocktail napkins and fed the information into Word docs or Excel spreadsheets," says Victor Pawluk, WIKA's national sales manager. "We realized a need to open our lines of communication, especially when connecting four or five sales reps that could be linked to a single sales opportunity that might cover engineering companies in Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto or Houston."
According to Pawluk, WIKA was challenged to review quotations, bids, sales calls and types of products for its customer base, and knew that the company could not rely solely upon manual processes, fax or e-mail. Initially, Pawluk evaluated a CRM solution in 2004 with minimal features and functionality. However, with WIKA's burgeoning growth and merger with another company, the scalability of the solution was limited. Plus, the solution lacked in quotation functionality, planning and call reporting
Solution: WIKA determined that better organization and communication was business critical within its sales processes and it led the company to select Selltis Sales, an on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) software for end-to-end sales process automation. Selltis Sales was ideally suited for the specialized needs of technical and
industrial sales organizations such as WIKA.
"At first, our sales executives were reluctant to use Selltis Sales since it involved more input of data and meant more accountability for their sales opportunities," adds Pawluk. "Now, they have embraced it as part of their daily routine since they can instantly view a quote, gain a better handle on planning, run in-depth reports and set up call activities."
Results: After four years of sales force automation success, WIKA migrated to the new Selltis Sales 5.0 version in February 2008. Selltis Sales 5.0 is the next-generation version delivered via a hosted, software as a service (SaaS) business model. The version's "hyperrelational" technology offers a "many-to-many" data-linking approach that proactively manages complex team sales environments. The Selltis Sales 5.0 model embraces collaboration with channel partners through a new Partner Relationship Management (PRM) module. Through this module, the new version introduces multi-tiered functionality and allows manufacturers to seamlessly communicate with reps and Distributors and maximize sales effectiveness throughout the sales channel.
Pawluk points to some of the key features of Selltis that provide industrial and technical organizations such as WIKA with an end-to-end sales process automation solution that goes beyond traditional CRM. "One of the single most important features that WIKA has optimized is the capability of Selltis Sales to handle quotes," says Pawluk. "Plus, the reporting is unbelievable. Even canned reports are useful and easily customized for filtering."
For example, Pawluk can simply filter out U.S. sales activities if he wants take a snapshot of Canadian plans for any given week—opportunities, activities, plans and status—all at the push of a button. "The system is so intuitive that we are able to continually customize the Selltis system. If we want a different view or need to add a 'hot button' for a SIC code, we can customize it easily," he adds.
In terms of linking capabilities, Pawluk can link leads and quotes easily. "Selltis was even willing to customize our views so we could see users, companies, projects, sales calls, and link them to automatically send out 'to do' items. If one of our sales reps is out sick, another exec can easily follow up on the opportunity since the item automatically appears on their 'to do' list as well."
WIKA has truly benefited by its use of Selltis and migration to the newest version. Pawluk notes that the savings of deploying Selltis have been innumerable. "Previously, if quotes were lost, then so was the ensuing business. Now, we can review the entire history of a specific opportunity and determine lessons learned and areas of improvement," he says. "We can also conduct forward planning based on sales history and prepare us today for the opportunities of tomorrow."
As far as impact on overall operations, Pawluk and his sales organization have seen tremendous time and productivity efficiencies with Selltis. "We would never return to the manual process of keeping records. Four years ago, we would run to a cabinet and review paper reports and now we have instant access. That alone provides huge time and cost savings," Pawluk says.
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