Unifying sales operations across business units for a custom manufacturer

The challenge

PTR Group manufactures metal and plastic components and creates sub-assemblies for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers across industries. While the company sells standard parts, it specializes in custom products and takes an active role in the design, prototype and production stages of its clients' projects.

Despite this specialized, collaborative work, PTR's internal teams struggled to collaborate with one another. The company relied on multiple, fragmented ERPs to store customer data, leaving it without a holistic view of its accounts, quotes and opportunities across business units.

Sales reps managed their pipeline through email, spreadsheets, PDFs and personal checklists. Without an efficient communication channel for cross-selling, salespeople had to proactively track down and loop in other business units themselves. Tasks and follow-ups lived in personal to-do lists rather than a shared system, and sales summaries and reports were manually collated and distributed by email. On top of it all, sales lacked a defined lead management process, making it difficult to route opportunities to the right team.

PTR wanted to use Salesforce to improve data visibility, drive collaboration across business units, gain strategic insight into its pipeline and capitalize on white space opportunities with existing customers.

The TELUS Digital solution

TELUS Digital implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud to give sales and service reps a holistic view of the customer, drive cross-business-unit collaboration and surface white space opportunities.

TELUS Digital migrated account, contact and opportunity data from three of PTR's four business units into a single Salesforce environment, consolidating records that had previously lived in separate, disconnected systems.

The team then implemented a unified sales process across all business units, along with additional functionality tailored to key stakeholders such as engineers who support the design and prototype stages of custom work. To round out the engagement, TELUS Digital stood up sales cycle automations that help reps manage their workload and adjust capacity as opportunities move through the pipeline.

The results

With a unified Salesforce platform in place, PTR Group gained the cross-business-unit visibility and collaboration it had been missing. Reps can now work from a shared source of customer data instead of piecing information together from email threads and spreadsheets.

Highlights include:

• Reps can cross-sell quickly and collaborate with full customer context in view
• Leads are categorized by business unit and transferred to the relevant staff automatically
• Sales reporting is automated, giving leadership additional visibility into the pipeline
• PTR has signed further contracts with TELUS Digital and requested the same team for future phases