B2B organisations are facing increasing demand from customers for a simple, consumer-like experience, and it’s already changing the way many businesses handle ecommerce. Cellebrite is a leading global provider of Digital Intelligence solutions for law enforcement, government agencies, and enterprise organisations.
Salesforce Strategic Account Executive, Nir Friedman, caught up with Yoav Silberman, Director of Customer Systems at Cellebrite to find out how he optimised B2B Commerce Cloud to empower his customers and meet the needs of a niche business.
What challenges were you facing around sales?
Yoav Silberman: Previously, our sales process was lengthy, manual, and complex. First, a team member would qualify a new lead and then manually produce a quote. The information was then sent to the customer to get approved by their procurement team before authorising their access to the Cellebrite solution.
We had already created a customer portal on the Salesforce Platform where customers can download products as a part of an existing initiative to empower them to self-serve. With the portal allowing customers to manage their accounts, users, and devices, the next logical step was to optimise the buying process. This approach not only enabled our company to deliver a superior customer experience but also helped us grow our overall market share.
Tell us more about your customer base
YS: Our customers range from both larger enterprises looking to optimise corporate investigations, to law enforcement agencies and organisations with big teams as well as individual contacts at local authorities.
With such a wide range of customers at different stages of sophistication and across varied industries, there’s a need to simplify and customise the buying process. Having the right tools readily available to investigators is critical to successfully investigating crimes and prosecuting criminals.
Therefore, our goal was to create a seamless customer experience, one embracing simplified buying and an accelerated product renewal and management process. To achieve all of these improvements, we replicated the ubiquitous consumer online shopping experience to give customers an environment familiar and comfortable to them with the B2B commerce portal.
Tell us about your digital commerce portal. How have you created this consumer-like experience?
YS: Salesforce is the backbone of our initiative to empower customers with self-service and keep their investigative workflows running smoothly. Our goal was to make ordering simple for the customer, with a secure central login to access our Cellebrite portal. Our customised instance of B2B Commerce is integrated with Heroku to give them one place to buy products and manage their devices.
The ecommerce platform isn’t public, it’s accessible via the customer portal and is currently only serving existing customers. Some of our products require intense vetting, and we have strict licensing policies that adhere to international guidelines on how our technology is utilised.
Other products and services, like training courses, have a straightforward buying journey and customers can simply select the product and go to the checkout like they would with any other webshop. One unusual trend that we uncovered was that customers were expensing products on their personal credit cards to get faster access, rather than dragging through an oftentimes lengthy corporate expense funnel.
So we created a workflow to support credit card payments. We’ve also streamlined the renewal journey — customers can pay in just three clicks, which is a dramatic improvement and removes many extra steps that have been necessary for larger organisations with detailed protocols, and for us internally.
We were actually one of the first companies to launch Commerce Cloud in Israel, and we worked closely with product teams to test functionality and capture feedback to help optimise the platform before we rolled it out to users.
What’s the benefit of integrating the B2B Commerce portal with Revenue Cloud and your customer community?
YS: We have built a one-stop shop to provide self-service shopping for customers. They can access products faster and have better visibility into their purchases from the same dashboard they use to manage their devices.
We’ve also built a support community within the portal where customers can ask us or other users specific questions about products. Maintaining and preserving privacy is a key pillar of our business and obviously very important in our industry, so we ensure these conversations are conducted privately under anonymised avatars.
From a Revenue Cloud perspective, when customers add items to their cart from the digital commerce portal, the CPQ component generates a quote and license key automatically in the backend of the system. And having dedicated price books allows customers to pay in their local currency and track each customer’s discount rate. Rolling out self-service capabilities and automating more processes also frees up the sales team to focus on having more meaningful conversations and building stronger relationships with customers.
Do you have any best practices to share with someone who’s building their own self-service customer portal?
YS: If you get it right, it’s well worth investing the time.
“The Salesforce Platform is a powerful and flexible tool, so don’t be afraid to build your own apps, processes, and workflows to make it work for your business and customers. ”
You can also leverage Trailhead to upskill your team and build up Salesforce expertise in-house. Only three of my team members had used Salesforce before and now we’ve got 16 experts!
Finally, whether you’re optimising processes for your team or your customers, think about what’s most valuable for them.
“Salesforce gives you the power to unlock richer insights into KPIs, trends, and customer behaviours so you’re not making decisions based on guesswork. ”
This lets your teams address and fix the biggest headaches in real time, giving you more buy-in for future innovations, and demonstrating to management how these optimised processes can propel the business forward.
For us, building the customer portal tapped into an existing desire for empowering customers with self-service. So our customers love using it and are happily exploring the platform — when we implemented the B2B Commerce portal customers started using it before we’d even announced it was there or given them any training on it!
Read more customer success stories to see how companies are redefining the customer experience.
