Joan Sistach, CIO of Galenicum, calls himself a lucky guy. Since he started working at the company, things have been going great. Customers are growing, business is booming, and the sales team is more productive than ever. But where he sees luck, we see a Trailblazer. We caught up with him to find out his top tips for a successful digital transformation.
Galenicum was founded in 2003 by three people who had a vision to make high-quality, affordable pharmaceuticals. Today, we operate all over the world and have branched out into other business areas, such as food, supplements, and veterinary products.
I joined the team in 2020 to develop a more strategic approach to IT and bring the business to the cutting-edge of innovation. Speaking about IT, my job is to make great things happen. Thanks to Salesforce, we’re only one year into our implementation and are already seeing positive results.
I’ve worked with Salesforce for a few years throughout my career, and whatever the industry, it always makes life easier for the sales team. When I got to Galenicum, I saw that there was a version of Salesforce Classic with few users for a single business unit, but it was not optimised to meet the needs of the entire corporation, so the first thing I did was listen to our internal needs.
We needed a solution that would allow us to unify concepts and support sales agents from all business units and that could be managed remotely, so Salesforce Lightning was the right choice and we implemented Sales Cloud with Maps, Inbox, and Tableau CRM to be able to overcome the challenges of all business units.
Another reason we chose Salesforce was how easy it is to add functionality. When we needed a solution to scan business cards, we found a solution through the AppExchange, and with the support of our partner, we implemented it quickly and successfully.
“With Salesforce we can think more strategically about how to bring our goals to life. The sales team is our revenue engine, so I started our modernisation initiative with them.”
Firstly, to define a global technology strategy aligned with our business. Then we needed to create a strong foundation of core applications capable of maintaining the entire life cycle of our data without alterations. We also wanted to explore artificial intelligence and machine learning to become more efficient and effective in our daily tasks. Salesforce was the best strategic solution for Galenicum because it meets those needs in addition to being one of the strongest components of our IT estate.
For us, Salesforce is more than a CRM platform, it is easy to use and with My Trailhead, you can find the answers to your questions very quickly. Salesforce is our platform for the entire sales team, both B2B and B2C, because it meets all our current needs and has the scope to meet them as they evolve in the future.
In the end, it came down to these four points:
1. You have to know that the sales team is your revenue engine, but they don’t always have the right tools and technical knowledge to be at their most efficient and effective.
2. We unified tools and processes within our two large B2B and B2C channels and reinforced strict boundaries to streamline sales management for each channel. This enabled us to provide better information to the customer and take advantage of the team’s synergy to strengthen our offering.
3. Training is very important and needs to be ongoing, without training, you cannot expect things to change.
4. We focused KPIs and analytic metrics on the needs of the B2B or B2C business.
With these four points considered, we only had one task left, and that was simply to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the entire sales team to know their needs, concerns, and how to improve their day-to-day jobs. At these internal meetings, we discovered the need to implement Salesforce Inbox and Salesforce Maps to make their life easier and smarter.
Salesforce Maps is becoming a very important tool to help sales reps plan their visits and have more impact. Having a planned route for the day, we can identify best practices that can be rolled out to the rest of the team to save time and improve satisfaction.
Meanwhile, Salesforce Inbox allows us to stay connected to customers all the time, which improves service quality. Ultimately, we are empowering the sales team to be more efficient and effective.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but you can still think about how to reinvent it. Make sure you communicate well and have a thorough understanding of the business: collaborate with other teams and simplify things. Don’t make big changes without knowing the root cause of the problem you’re trying to address and understanding the process on every level.
The technology alone won’t make you efficient, you need to find areas to optimise the platform to meet your needs. Focus on simple tools and take advantage of the built-in capabilities to grow your business. Technology is just one tool, and using it well can help your entire business to scale faster.
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