The challenge
Van Horn, Metz & Company (VHM) is a leading distributor of raw materials for customers across North America. It’s supported by global sourcing capabilities, 12 warehouses and six sales offices. As the business grew, its sales operations struggled to keep pace.
VHM lacked a central system for tracking leads, and with no data validation in place, reps entering information manually introduced inaccuracies that undermined reporting. Leads arrived through a web form and were distributed to sales reps by email, leaving no system in place to track their progress once assigned. VHM also had no way to mandate adherence to its own opportunity process, which meant reps could skip required steps or submit incomplete data without any check in place.
Sample requests presented a similar gap. Suppliers and customer service reps fielding these requests received no automated follow-up reminders, which occasionally led to samples being forgotten. And because quotes were stored as free-text notes in VHM's legacy CRM platform, producing standardized, professional quotes was slow and inconsistent. Together, these gaps left VHM's sales organization without the structure, visibility or accountability it needed to scale.
The TELUS Digital solution
TELUS Digital worked closely with VHM to implement the company's opportunity process directly within Salesforce, pairing Sales Cloud and Manufacturing Cloud to give the sales team a scalable, unified foundation.
The team customized VHM's Sales Cloud and Manufacturing Cloud environments to reflect the company's existing sales process, then built a centralized system to track and report on all sales activity. Validation Rules and Custom Validation with Flow were introduced to enforce data validation throughout the opportunity management process, closing the gap that had allowed incomplete data to move forward unchecked.
To address sample management, TELUS Digital stood up a custom screen flow that facilitates sample requests and automatically triggers follow-up reminders. The team also mapped an integration between VHM's enterprise resource planning system and its Salesforce org, giving sales reps the ability to visualize ERP data directly within the context of the sales process.
Finally, TELUS Digital introduced Salesforce quoting with line items and standardized PDF generation, replacing free-text quote notes with a consistent, professional format.
The results
With the new Salesforce environment in place, VHM's sales organization gained the structure and visibility it had been missing. Leads, opportunities, samples and quotes now move through a single, connected system rather than a patchwork of manual steps. Post-project, Van Horn, Metz & Company can:
- Queue and assign new leads within Salesforce, then track progress and outcomes using Salesforce reports
- Enforce opportunity process adherence and ensure data completion at every stage
- Better manage samples-in-progress by automatically assigning follow-up tasks to designated service reps
- Use standard Salesforce functionality to quote from a given opportunity, including tier-based pricing where applicable
- Generate PDFs directly from Salesforce and send them to customers using Salesforce Inbox
