When Lars Nilsson joined Cloudera as VP of Field Operations, he did what great leaders do: he identified the biggest pain points preventing his sales team from performing at 100% then implemented solutions to eliminate them. For Cloudera, one of those pain points was fast growth and its impact on sales productivity. With fifteen-plus years of field operations experience, Lars knew that he had to get in front of that challenge immediately.

In the first installment of our new AppExchange Connected Leaders Series, we talk to this Salesforce veteran user of 14 years about how he used the AppExchange to extend Cloudera’s Salesforce CRM and Sales Cloud, and how that decision changed the game for his sales team.  

Salesforce: Can you give us a quick overview of what Cloudera does?

Lars Nilsson: Cloudera provides a platform of software and services that helps organizations store, process, and analyze enterprise data, transforming businesses with remarkable cost efficiencies. We were founded in 2008 and have grown to more than 800 employees worldwide, including a sales team of 250 people.

SF: Tell us about some of the challenges you identified at Cloudera when you came on board.

LN: One of the biggest challenges we faced was getting proposals out the door quickly to prospects because of our complicated pricing model. Nothing was standard and our sales reps often relied on the sales operation team to help out with both standard and one-off quotes, which means they often had to wait for information instead of being able to get proposals out the door quickly. We knew that process wouldn’t scale for the type of growth we were expecting, so we turned to the AppExchange to find something that would help. We chose SteelBrick CPQ because it was native to Salesforce and we knew it would simplify our whole CPQ process and grow with us.  

SF: Tell us about how that decision changed the game for your sales team.

LN: Now our sales people spend time doing what they do best: selling. They get more quotes out the door because they don’t have to rely as heavily on people outside the team to create them. We have a clear process in place for generating standard quotes and proposals, and as a result, 90% of our quotes can be configured by sales reps themselves with no outside help. They’re thrilled at how much more quickly they can get a quote out the door, as well as the fact that they don’t have to worry about inaccuracies anymore. With more than 1,000 quotes being generated each quarter, we’ve been able to increase efficiencies and speed up the sales process tremendously.

SF: What else can you do now that you couldn’t do before?

LN: Inconsistent discounting was a big problem for us. Now we’re able to develop dashboards that allow us to quickly and easily identify where the problems are and change that behavior, which is hugely valuable because it cuts right to our bottom line.

Another thing we’ve been able to do is implement a recommendation engine. We found that our renewal rates were slipping because we weren’t selling enough of the types of products that would keep those renewals up. We created a process that recommended relevant renewal products to sales reps whenever they configured quotes. Now they’re automatically populated in every single quote so reps never forget to include them. It’s made a huge difference.

SF: What advice would you give to peers facing similar growth challenges?

LN: I would suggest that anyone working for a company that plans on having massive growth get in front of anticipated problems and set the right infrastructure for the type of growth you’re going to have. For Cloudera, the AppExchange and SteelBrick CPQ helped us do that. It changed our process for the better. It’s all about getting in front of the problems before they arise.

Watch the full interview with Lars here.

The AppExchange Connected Leaders Series features conversations with forward-thinking, Salesforce customers and leaders in their fields who solved a complex business challenge with an AppExchange app.