Customer success story
Spreadsheets that were out of date the moment they were printed
CF Group’s sales people used to visit customers carrying distributed spreadsheets. They were awkward on a phone, took repetitive work to produce, and were stale on arrival. Rapidi put invoices, orders and quotes from Microsoft Dynamics AX into Salesforce, where a rep can actually reach them.
If you see a swimming pool in France, there is a good chance its liner, its cover and the chemicals keeping the water clean came from CF Group. The company adopted Salesforce in 2014, largely so the sales team could work from Salesforce Mobile during visits. Getting value out of it meant moving ERP data across. An earlier attempt using web services and Talend failed on the amount of customisation in AX; Rapidi handled it.
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The company
CF Group, formerly Fija Group, was founded in 1975 to supply swimming pool liners, covers and related products in France, which is the largest European market for them. It is a major player, and it has not treated that as a reason to slow down: the company still approaches the market as entrepreneurs and keeps trying to anticipate what customers will need next. The focus has been shifting with the market, from supplying products for new pools towards supporting the renovation of existing ones, and alongside the physical materials the company provides training and other services. More about the company at my-cfgroup.fr.
Choosing Salesforce in 2014 was part of that. The reasoning was specific rather than general.
“We chose Salesforce because of the ease of our sales team using Salesforce Mobile during customer visits,” says Sarah Delaunay, Manager of Marketing Operations, who leads the implementation. “Accessing the Dynamics AX server remotely is not convenient, and we don’t want all our employees to have access to the system, anyway.”
The method it replaced was spreadsheets. “Distributing spreadsheets, our previous method, created a lot of repetitive and unproductive work, the documents were not easy to view in a mobile environment, and they were out of date as soon as they were produced.”
The attempt that did not work
Before Rapidi, CF Group evaluated web services together with the Salesforce Talend tool.
“The attempt failed because of the amount of customization we had made to AX,” Delaunay says. “When we discovered Rapidi, we finally had something that we thought would work.”
That is a recurring shape in these stories. A generic connector meets an ERP that has been shaped around a specific business over years, and the customisation is exactly what the connector cannot see.
What the sales team actually needed
Three things, in Delaunay’s account: invoices, orders and quotes.
With those in hand a rep walks into a meeting knowing the price, the availability and the customer’s buying pattern. They also know whether there have been recent payment problems or other issues that would change how the conversation should go.
She makes a point about adoption that is worth repeating, because it is not the usual one. Access to real-time data is what sells a CRM to a sales team — as much as the software’s own features, possibly more. There is always some reluctance to learn a new tool. When the tool hands over data people have wanted for years, the learning curve stops being an argument.
Marketing gets the same data, used differently
“When we have a marketing campaign, on pool covers, for example, we want to know who has bought them in the past. Now it is easy to get this information via Salesforce, because the historical invoices will be routinely transferred from AX,” Delaunay explains.
The inverse query matters just as much. “We also might want the opposite, to find out which customers have not been buying certain products from us. It is usually easier and cheaper to upsell an existing customer, rather than find new ones.”
And better data is not only a sales instrument. “It is not just better sales, but also better service. If we have better data we can serve our customers better. Despite our dominant position, it is still a very dynamic and competitive industry, and good service is what helps to keep existing accounts happy and continuing to buy from us.”
On reporting she is admiring but precise. “The reports in Salesforce are easy to generate, but you have to have the data available!”
Underneath all of it sits the unglamorous saving: less data entry, and fewer errors from entering the same thing twice, such as updating contact details on an account.
Take it with you
The whole story as a PDF
Five pages: the spreadsheets that were out of date the moment they were produced, the customisation that sank web services and Talend, and Sarah Delaunay on what changed for sales and for marketing. Yours after one short form.
Working with the consultant
Delaunay worked closely with a Rapidi consultant on the design of the data transfers. Her own knowledge of Salesforce and AX meshed with his, and she is clear that her understanding of CF Group’s internal processes — and how they ought to appear in Salesforce — was critical to how smoothly it went.
I was also really impressed with the Rapidi Consultant’s positive attitude. He never said ‘it’s impossible’, he didn’t seem to know that word. He always got the job done for us, and was always available when we needed help.
Asked what she would tell another company about to integrate a CRM and an ERP, she pauses before answering. “You need to make sure that your team has all the knowledge within your company, about your own processes, including your Salesforce and ERP implementations, and then they can work most effectively with Rapidi on the design of the transfers.”
She adds a practical note: every phase can be run through online meetings, but starting with a face-to-face session may be worth it if your business processes or your software are heavily customised.
When you work with Rapidi, you don’t need to have deep technical experts in-house, just people who understand how their own company’s sales, marketing and finance systems interact.
She has already recommended Rapidi to colleagues at other companies facing the same problem.
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