NextPlane is a leader in scalable real-time B2B collaboration and unified communications federation services, using a subscription business model. With over 1,000 organizations as partners, it provides the world’s largest and fastest-growing network of federation-ready companies, sending more than 125 million messages across over 2,500 unique corporate domains every day.

To manage their partners and customers, the company had become a Salesforce customer in 2007. They used out-of-the box CRM functionality without customization and many manual processes. Salesforce served essentially as an address book and notes repository. However, in 2018 the company was experiencing accelerated growth and needed a CRM system that supported their ambitious corporate goals.

Farzin Shahidi, NextPlane’s CEO said: “Based on their stellar track record with Salesforce deployments, we chose West Coast Consulting to perform a complete overhaul of our Sales Cloud implementation, bring in best practices and speed up the quote-to-case process.” West Coast Consulting gathered detailed information from the business team to create use cases for Sales Cloud 2.0, including Lightning, Opportunity Manage-ment, Territory Management, Quote Management and Forecasting.

Using agile development methodology, the consulting team implemented a configure-price-quote process across all product lines. Previously, the sales team used Excel spreadsheets to manage products and pricing, and then entered the opportunity amount into Salesforce, created a separate word document for the quote, which was finally emailed by Outlook to the prospect. Now quotes are created with a 1-click process and are sent to prospects or customers directly from Salesforce, which helps shorten the deal cycle by 60%.

This new approach greatly improved pipeline visibility and forecasting accuracy. West Coast Consulting established territory management by regions, mapping all accounts to geographic areas based on customized territory assignment rules. This further improved pipeline management and and enabled granular forecasting by team and region.

Salesforce Einstein provides the NextPlane sales team with insights on where to focus, and identify which deals are up for renewal. Salesforce Inbox allows them to easily manage their activities from within Outlook, without having to skip from one application to the next. This greatly improved their productivity and effectiveness for responding to quotes in a timely manner.

Since the Sales Cloud launch, the company has seen drastic improvements in their territory management, pipeline, and forecasting. Enabling Products and creating streamlined Pricebooks for the three main product lines has helped sales create better opportunities and provide accurate quotes faster to their prospects. Salesforce Inbox helped increase their responsiveness to new inquiries even further.

West Coast Consulting’s implementation of industry best-practices have helped shorten NextPlane’s deal cycle by 60% and increased their pipeline by 32%.

“We have transformed our organization from manual to digital business processes and can now report on our business trends, pipeline, and forecasts in real-time,” said Farzin Shahidi. “We finally have a system that is positioning us for growth”.