Tammy Pilgreen

The new Black+Decker eCommerce site is a consumer-centric experience that reflects the diversity of the Black+Decker brand of products, from the bev cocktail machine to home crafting tools to the more traditional DIY-friendly power tools. Based on the Shopify platform, this new eCommerce site sets up the Black+Decker user experience to a more holistic level, incorporating more intimate customer journeys and driving increased brand loyalty and corresponding sales. Integrated with back-end operational systems, with front-end CRM and with multiple built-in apps to enhance the customer’s online shopping experience, this site is positioned for success.

The Sales Builder app gives visual cues to the sales team to quickly see “white space” opportunities for higher-margin product sales, with the ability to drill up and down within territories/accounts, as well as product categories/individual products. Sales Builder removes the need for multiple reports to be analyzed for accounts with both depth and breadth of product assortment.

Analytics is an essential tool for making timely decisions that lead to faster, more profitable sales. The Sales Builder app combines account planning with high-speed analytics. Fine-tuned analytics within the Sales Builder app also helps the sales team to focus on product categories with the greatest potential for sales growth.

The Sales Builder app helps streamline the account planning process upfront, along with post-revenue analysis that drives more data-driven decision-making for both sales and marketing.

A true competitive advantage, the Coaches Portal was a persona-inspired process, delivering a superior customer experience that tied the coach, as a customer, more tightly to the company creating a higher cost of changing to a competitor. A highly customer-intimate integration of apps and data, including eCommerce shops, was used so a coach can get the information they need in one place: Order status, team roster updates, team sizes, event registration, team members payment status, customer service, sales representative communications, and updated marketing information.

The architectural design for this portal included two mobile apps, three web apps, and three legacy system apps, integrated via the Salesforce.com platform, utilizing Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud, Heroku, Marketing Cloud, multiple databases, WebSphere ecommerce, several custom Force.com apps, and a central identity service enabling single sign-on for the coach.

Benefits of the solution extend beyond initial concepts, including the ability to market to coaches in a more personalized approach, and gaining important market feedback from the coaches as they interact with the company via the Coaches Portal. The customer journeys are truly unique.

The objective of the Impact Data Platform was to bring customer and transaction data details into one combined platform to be used by a group of elite sales team members to first identify the largest opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling and then to follow the Lead to Opportunity process, tracking progress with Sales Cloud dashboards and reports.

The Impact Data Platform was developed using multiple organizations across Salesforce.com, consolidating customer and transaction data from multiple sources: SAP, Peoplesoft Financials, eCommerce sites, and legacy systems. A unique identifier was assigned to properly group customers’ data across the data sources.

Data integration pathways were designed and developed to update daily, so each day the sales team would have refreshed data from all three companies (daily being fast enough for this long selling cycle business). High levels of testing were required iteratively to identify defects and other data anomalies.

Leveraging consolidated data, the sales team harnessed the power of CRM tools: Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Community Cloud to sell high-impact solutions to customers across the three companies. This strategic model increased revenues for all companies.