As a rapidly growing organisation specialising in IT procurement and solutions consultancy, Infrastar appreciated the value of the Salesforce platform to support and scale their business. They invested primarily in Sales Cloud and began to capture customer details and data.

However, Infrastar were working so hard in their business, they didn’t have the capacity to work on their Salesforce configuration to best support their way of working. They needed help fast. One Salesforce consultant they approached was not agile enough to get them up and running in the timeframe they required. 

Then they found Performa IT.

The Requirements

“We were using Sales Cloud to store emails and register new business,” says Technical Solutions Specialist at Infrastar, Josh Stinchcombe, “but we were continuing to operate the business outside the platform.

“For example, all our quotes, POs and invoices were still done in Excel and just attached to the customer details in Sales Cloud. There was no easy way to track the sale or profit.

“We wanted better integration of our Sales and Finance information, with more functionality, greater transparency and a better return on investment for our license fee!” 

“When the Performa IT team came in to talk to us about what they could do for us, they had some great ideas.

“They found flexible ways of developing link between Sales and Finance that wouldn’t incur ongoing cost. And they were keen to deliver functionality straight away rather than do lengthy discovery sessions about our operation.”

The Solution

Develop Opportunities

• “Performa began with putting all our Excel-based invoices and quotes into Sales Cloud, and then developed a single interface where we could generate all our quotes, invoices and POs per customer,” Josh explains.

Separate Sales and Support

• “As we needed to research the market and find the best prices for equipment to resell to our customer base, we wanted an easy way to link customer requests to supplier offers. In the Case area, Performa IT enabled us to match requests to offers and keep track of all email correspondence with suppliers. By viewing all the options in one place, linked back to the request Case, we can determine the best deals for our customers,” Josh says.

Automated Exchange Rates

• “We used to check the exchange rate daily and manually key it into a spreadsheet for our quotes. But Performa IT automated this so that Sales Cloud applies the most up to date exchange rate in our quotes and purchase orders.”

Integrated Telephony

• “Although all our customers’ emails are held in Salesforce, quite a lot of information and negotiation happens by phone. Performa adapted the platform so that all our calls could be received through Sales Cloud too – making sure that all correspondence could be captured by Customer Opportunity or Supplier Case.

Working with Performa IT

Value Added by Performa IT

• Engaged in 2022
• Customised Salesforce instance for efficient operation
• Ongoing development and support

Describing how Performa IT’s work has helped Infrastar, Josh says: “All information and activity around Opportunities and Cases can now be tracked and easily traced back to the correct Customer. So much time is being saved in collating information and checking it is for the right Opportunity!

“There is far more structure and logic in oir operation now, and each Salesforce user has their own chain of activity, which helps the team take ownership and work more efficiently and accurately.

“Performa are helping us eliminate the risk of manual mistakes by automating margin and discount calculations based on buy and sell prices and exchange rates. We can rely on  the platform to update margins and keep sales prices the same. 

“This is making our financial profit information more transparent and easy to monitor.

Recommendation

“We are moving towards holding a more complete list of products that we can click to select. This will make our Sales process even smoother,” says Josh.

“As we come to trust and rely more on the platform, we will no doubt be inspired to ask Performa IT to add more customisations and enhancements to support our growth.

“Performa IT are very helpful and are always willing to adjust and find alternative ways to deliver what we’re asking for to save ys money in the long run,” says Josh.

“The team is always available to answer any questions and will definitely go the extra mile to add value. I would definitely recommend them to other businesses wanting to get up and running with Salesforce.”