Schneider Electric works with hundreds of distributor contacts around the world to sell its industrial automation products. To enable effective and efficient real-time alignment on such a massive scale, Schneider Electric needs to find new ways to empower its people with digital tools. Trailblazers David Coquelet and Ljiljana Budimir explain how they are enriching partner relationships with Quip and share their tips for delivering successful change.
Enabling real-time alignment on a global scale
Channel partners are critical to the success of Schneider Electric. From telemetry software and safety systems to predictive maintenance solutions and robotics, distributors are a key route to market for the group’s industrial automation products.
To help its internal teams and distributors provide a great customer experience and drive growth, Schneider Electric needs to simplify information-sharing and goal-setting. The industrial automation division has been developing joint growth plans with industrial automation distributors for several years, but the process had become complex and time-consuming.
“The joint growth plans were managed in different formats, such as spreadsheets, in different countries and often shared by email, which was inefficient.”
Ljiljana Budimir added: “we wanted to enable a more collaborative approach and to empower our sales teams and distributors with real-time information.”
At the same time as boosting efficiency and transparency, Schneider Electric needed to ensure that sensitive information remained secure. “Every new solution that we develop or launch has to go through a rigorous certification process,” explained David Coquelet.
“We needed to find a way to bring people together to collaborate on the plans without compromising security.”
Enriching relationships with innovative collaboration capabilities
Schneider Electric, which operates in 100 countries and employs more than 130,000 people, has been using Salesforce for more than 10 years to empower its teams and optimise its processes. “The Salesforce platform is constantly expanding, which presents us with new innovation opportunities,” said David. “When we heard about Quip, we decided to put its collaboration capabilities to the test in a proof of concept for our joint growth plans.”
Quip passed the test and Schneider Electric is now piloting the solution with around 200 internal users and distributors in Brazil, India, Indonesia and the US. “With Quip, we can turn static documents into actionable data-driven plans that can be updated 24/7,” added David.
The Trailblazers worked with stakeholders in each country to understand their needs and to build customised templates for the joint growth plans. Each plan relates not only to a specific distributor but also to a specific customer. By integrating Quip with Sales Cloud, this customer information can be automatically populated, thus saving time and preventing manual errors. If a plan is mistakenly deleted or edited, it’s easy to revert to a previous version.
Maximising efficiency and transparency with intelligent integrations
Schneider Electric has also integrated Quip with its distributor portal, which provides secure and easy access to relevant joint growth plans. Internal users, which include channel account managers and sales managers, can click through to the plans via their main dashboard. “By enabling real-time collaboration on joint growth plans, we hope to boost productivity so people can spend more time supporting our customers and driving new business rather than inputting data,” said Ljiljana.
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As well as making it easier for distributors and internal users to update and review plans in real-time, Quip also enables them to send direct messages to colleagues. “Chats and comments are visible to authorised users, which promotes greater transparency,” commented Ljiljana. “Tasks can be assigned to different individuals with due dates and email reminders, which makes it easier to manage workflows.”
Delivering successful change
People are essential to driving the adoption of new technologies. But not everyone will be ready for change, which means a great idea does not always become a great success. “Change management is often the biggest challenge when implementing digital processes and tools,” said Ljiljana. “It’s important that people understand the value of a new solution.”
As part of the pilot, the Trailblazers worked with Bhupesh Shangari, Industry Digital Channel Director and senior business sponsor in the industrial automation division, to help champion the benefits of the new approach for joint growth plans. “Strong business sponsorship is essential for effective change management,” said David. “It enabled us to not only showcase the overall benefits of real-time collaboration but also explain how the new solution would improve day-to-day tasks for individual users.”
Close alignment with business leaders and users also helped to ensure the project stayed on track. “When exploring new digital technologies, scope creep can become an issue as there’s so much potential for transformation,” explained Ljiljana. “It’s important to remain focused on the primary use case especially during the proof of concept and pilot stages.”
Measuring and demonstrating success
With so many digital initiatives competing for precious resources, businesses need to ensure they can measure the success of a pilot. “Before we implemented Quip, we sent out a survey to evaluate the Net Promoter Score for the joint growth plans. We’ll be sending out another survey at the end of the pilot to see how the score has changed,” said David.
Net Promoter Score is just one way of measuring success. Schneider Electric also plans to implement adoption dashboards to track how the joint growth plans are being used in different countries. “Channel and sales teams will also be able to track how often plans are being updated by distributors and their overall performance, which will encourage more proactive and productive conversations,” added David.
These adoption insights will help Schneider Electric decide whether to scale the solution once the pilot comes to an end in October 2021. The solution could eventually be used by around 2,000 partner contacts in more than 30 countries.
Achieving better results through real-time alignment
Schneider Electric has been regularly capturing feedback from distributors and internal users throughout the pilot. “A continuous feedback loop is critical as it enables you to keep enriching the solution to make it more relevant for the users,” said David. “We’ve received lots of interesting ideas for future enhancements.”
The Quip pilot at Schneider Electric was a great illustration of how real-time alignment can deliver better outcomes. “Involving different territories enabled us to explore different needs and perspectives, which is really important in a global organisation,” commented Ljiljana. “Salesforce provided us with fantastic support during both the proof of concept and pilot, which helped us maximise the potential of digitalising the joint growth plans.”
Driving productivity
By providing distributors and internal teams with better visibility on joint growth plans, Schneider Electric hopes to boost productivity and transparency. Engaging with business stakeholders and measuring the impact of the new digital approach will be key to the success of the pilot, which could transform hundreds of distributor and customer relationships around the world. Quip is empowering Schneider Electric with real-time alignment across the globe. And Schneider Electric is powering their customers to exciting new places. Quip and real-time alignment? That’s an electric combination.
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