Salesforce for manufacturing: functionality, case studies & payoffs
July 4, 2024
Salesforce provides manufacturers with industry-specific tools and generic CRM capabilities to streamline sales, marketing, and customer service operations, foster cooperation with partners, and build robust customer relationships.
Itransition’s Salesforce specialists describe the functional scope of Manufacturing Cloud, the main Salesforce product for this sector, along with other valuable features for manufacturing companies included in the standard CRM suite. We also provide real-life examples of Salesforce implementation and describe the benefits of adopting this popular platform in the manufacturing industry.
Capabilities of Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud
Manufacturing Cloud is a CRM solution built on top of the Salesforce Customer 360 suite that extends the standard functionality of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud with industry-specific features. Manufacturers can adopt Manufacturing Cloud for Sales ($250 user/month billed annually), for Service (same pricing), or both ($275 user/month billed annually), along with Flow for Manufacturing available in all plans and additional tools licensed separately. Here’s a comprehensive overview of all features and tools in the Manufacturing Cloud scope.
Manufacturing Cloud for Sales
Sales Agreements
Drafting, editing, approving, and renewing agreements, defining their terms (such as product categories, pricing, volumes, and schedules), tracking the actual revenue and quantity levels from fulfilled orders, and comparing such values with planned ones to verify customers’ contract compliance for committed orders.
Advanced Account Forecasting
Processing orders, opportunities, and sales agreements data from customer accounts to forecast future order quantities and revenues over a specific period, including product- and region-specific predictions.
Program Based Business
Enabling manufacturing suppliers in the aerospace, automotive, and engineer-to-order sectors to get insights into their customers’ production programs and forecasts and accurately estimate the components they’ll need to manufacture new products.
Experience Cloud Sites for Manufacturing
Setting up branded collaboration and self-service portals where partners can submit warranty claims for assets they repair, monitor product shipments, or track rebate payouts for asset and component sales. You can also set up portals for customers to provide timely support and information on orders and warranties.
Account Manager Targets
Defining clear organizational targets for revenue, order amounts, customer satisfaction, and other metrics based on business growth plans to motivate your account managers and set personal goals by product, account, and time period for your sales teams.
Partner Visit Management
Helping sales managers schedule field rep visits to distributors and other channel partners, prepare lists of tasks to perform (including upselling additional products or negotiating sales agreement renewals), and track assessment indicators (such as the number of sales agreements to renew).
Manufacturing Cloud for Service
Service Console for Manufacturing
Providing a unified tool for customer service reps to get a full view of customer interactions and handle multiple service tasks, such as tracking past customer interactions, creating customer cases, monitoring order statuses and asset performance, searching for knowledge articles, and offering extended warranties.
Warranty Lifecycle Management
Managing warranties for products and assets, including defining warranty entitlements (parts and expenses covered, etc.) and eligibility terms (duration, product usage, etc.), investigating warranty claims from partners and distributors manually or via process automation tools, and tracking expenses incurred.
Product and Part Inventory
Helping inventory managers, service technicians, and service reps search for specific products at different inventory locations, monitor inventory transfers between warehouses or product shipments, and track the repair, return, or recall of product items.
Additional tools
Flow for Manufacturing
Setting up automated workflows (e.g., recalculating account forecasts) via a point-and-click interface, building guided interactions for your agents (for instance, providing them with contextual information), and automating decision-making processes by setting business rules.
Rebate Management
Creating rebate programs to reward partners meeting an agreed-upon sales target, defining benefits (such as special prices and discounts) and benefit qualification thresholds, and automating rebate payout calculations.
Intelligent Field Service
Providing field service specialists with customer data, asset history, and service records to facilitate onsite tasks, enabling technicians to access knowledge bases through a Field Service mobile app, and optimizing field service scheduling based on case priority and travel time.
CRM Analytics for Manufacturing
Providing account managers with insights and forecasts on sales and supply chain trends, including revenues over time, price elasticity, customer lifetime value, distributor performance, high-performing accounts, top-selling products, order statuses, and compliance levels of your sales agreements.
MuleSoft Accelerator for Manufacturing
Integrating Manufacturing Cloud with enterprise resource planning systems, order management systems, and other software or services via pre-built APIs to enable seamless exchange of account, product, and order data and other information.
Partner with Itransition for seamless Salesforce adoption
Industry-agnostic Salesforce functionality for manufacturers
Salesforce's suite of generic CRM products encompasses various industry-agnostic features that manufacturing companies can benefit from. Luckily, Salesforce allows organizations to mix Manufacturing Cloud users and standard Cloud users. Also, keep in mind that you can configure and customize Salesforce's off-the-shelf functionality, further aligning it with your industry-specific goals.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Lead Generation
to build landing pages or forms via a drag-and-drop interface and set up personalized customer journeys
- Media Planning and Pacing Optimization
to monitor campaign performance and improve the budgeting and pacing of media plans.
- Email Studio
to maximize the effectiveness of your newsletters and marketing campaigns via personalized email messages.
- Einstein Web Recommendations
to personalize website content based on visitors’ preference profiles via Einstein, Salesforce’s built-in AI tool.
- AI-Driven Journey Triggers
to adjust buying journeys (including personalized product offers and cart abandonment journeys) in real time based on customer behavior.
- Einstein Marketing Insights
to track marketing KPIs and identify factors that may influence marketing performance.
Salesforce Sales Cloud
- Einstein Lead Scoring
to rank leads based on how likely they are to convert and help sales teams prioritize high-value ones.
- Einstein Generative AI for Sales
to create personalized emails for contacts and leads based on sales data with the help of generative AI.
- Buyer Assistant
powered by natural language processing to help pitch your products after business hours, qualify leads more accurately, and connect them with a sales rep.
- Customer Signals
to pinpoint different conversation topics, such as pricing requests and recurring objections, and modify customer interactions accordingly.
- Configure, Price, Quote
to provide accurate quotes for configured products based on the required customizations, optional features, quantities, and discounts.
- Insights and Dashboards
to track sales team KPIs, for example, closed deals and pipeline volume, and highlight cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
Salesforce Service Cloud
- Case Management
to automatically distribute cases among service specialists and provide them with customer information to contextualize each case.
- Einstein Bots
which can be deployed across multiple channels (in-app, web, etc.), to assist customers with various tasks, such as providing them with order status updates or resetting passwords.
- Einstein Article Recommendations
to suggest relevant knowledge base articles that can help customer service specialists solve open cases faster.
- Einstein Conversation Mining
to probe customer interactions, identify common reasons why customers contact your service center, and prioritize actionable contact reasons while selecting high-frequency cases worth addressing through automation.
- Service Performance Dashboards
to track service KPIs, including average case resolution time and total escalated cases, and evaluate agent performance and routing efficiency.
Examples of Salesforce adoption in the manufacturing industry
The benefits of adopting Salesforce in manufacturing
A single source of truth
You can improve business process visibility and make more informed decisions due to Salesforce’s ability to consolidate and analyze customer and sales information. For instance, manufacturers can fine-tune production schedules based on predicted order quantities.
Superior customer experience
You can create tailored buying journeys and communications to boost customer engagement using Salesforce. Additionally, you can access Salesforce’s warranty management capabilities and provide timely technical assistance for more pleasant service experiences.
Enhanced productivity
Using Salesforce, you can enable your supply chain partners to share information on inventory levels and production to ensure timely replenishment of components and business continuity. What’s more, this CRM platform automates time-consuming processes like sales agreement creation and renewal, which allows you to save manual efforts and operational costs.
Increased profits
You can use Salesforce’s advanced marketing toolkit to create personalized offers and interactions and thus improve conversions. The platform can also be useful to your sales teams, providing them with up-to-date customer information for more effective negotiations.
Itransition’s Salesforce services for manufacturing companies
- Assess your existing CRM solution, if any
- Establish functional and non-functional requirements
- Choose a suitable Salesforce edition and feature set
- Define an implementation roadmap and budget
- Provide configuration and customization consultancy
- Assist with Salesforce integration and data migration
- Offer user training and ongoing support
- Configure and customize your Salesforce solution
- Integrate the Salesforce platform with your software ecosystem (ERP, OMS, etc.)
- Execute QA and user acceptance testing
- Deploy the solution to the company’s environment
- Migrate data from your legacy CRM to Salesforce
Create your Salesforce solution with Itransition’s guidance
A centralized hub for your CRM operations
With its combined offering of specialized tools for manufacturers and comprehensive industry-agnostic functionality, the Salesforce suite can unify all your CRM operations in one powerful solution. Salesforce helps manufacturing businesses simplify marketing and sales processes, streamline customer service, and strengthen relationships with clients and partners.
To overcome potential implementation challenges and make the most of the platform’s capabilities, consider relying on an experienced partner like Itransition for Salesforce adoption.
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