Mitsubishi Electric’s Cooling & Heating Division is an innovator of high-efficiency climate control systems that provide uncompromising comfort with a small environmental footprint. To get their products to customers, the company works with their own internal sales team plus a wide network of distributors, contractors, and design-engineering firms across North America and the Caribbean.

When it comes to conducting business, “there’s not a lot of leading-edge technology across the cooling and heating industry,” says Christopher Osment, Director of IT at Mitsubishi Electric. “In our organization, we needed to elevate 240 sales associates—plus our distribution partners—from the 19th century into the 21st.”

Mitsubishi Electric’s decentralized sales team previously relied on a varied and inconsistent mix of documentation to generate quotes. Everything from spreadsheets to faxes to napkin sketches were used, resulting in a lengthy sales cycles and decreased sales productivity. It hampered pipeline visibility, caused inventory gaps, and made it difficult to predict revenues. And, when the customer demanded a fast quote turnaround, they just couldn’t respond.

Mitsubishi Electric brought in EDL Consulting to help them streamline their quoting process and increase collaboration with distributors. Together they launched a Partner Community using Salesforce Community Cloud and Salesforce CPQ, bringing product information, partner certification, self-service quoting, and lead registration to a single platform.

Mitsubishi Electric quickly realized a 30 percent increase in the number of projects being documented and approved, and giving them more accurate forecasts. Within six months, Mitsubishi Electric started seeing even bigger improvements to their sales quoting process:

• Sales quote cycle times decreased by more than 90 percent.

• Sales quote approval times dropped from two days down to two hours.

• Time to verify quote pricing was reduced from hours to minutes.

“By making everything available online, all in one place, and easy to use for distributors and our sales team, we’re able to respond to projects faster and win more,” says Osment. 

Mitsubishi Electric also saw additional benefits to their sales quote process, many simply by helping sales reps increase efficiency by spending less time dealing with faxes, email, and unnecessary paperwork, and keeping partners up-to-date with timely information on products, promotions, pricing, and availability. In the process, they eliminated an estimated 10,000 emails and voicemails. Ironically, even with less emails and voicemails, communications between internal reps and distributors improved!

“It’s also improved our operations in that quotes are done correctly the first time,” adds Osment. “We’re able to feed that information directly into our order management and inventory forecast system and have the proper bill of materials in the warehouse when it’s time to ship that order.”

With increased visibility all around, sales teams can see leads in the pipeline, work together to convert them into opportunities, and generate accurate, up-to-the-minute quotes within a single system.

Using Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce Community Cloud has created the perfect climate for heating up Mitsubishi Electric’s sales quote process, and we think that’s cool.