SalesNextLevel Program at Wienerberger leading to build centralized CRM
26. 11. 2021 | Karl SchollerAt Wienerberger they do not just build the future of their customers, they are also aimed to build the future of our commercial teams. To do so, they are introducing their Sales Next Level program. We have asked Karl Scholler, their CRM Manager more details about it.
Karl Schöller – CRM Manager - Karl started to work with CRM systems in 2000 and during his career, he has implemented projects within major CRM solutions available in the market. His main focus is on the construction industry. Since 2018, Karl has been responsible for Wienerberger’s current CRM solution and support of all 24 Pipelife organizations.
What is the Sales Next Level Program about?
Sales Next Level will cover the complete customer lifecycle and all processes along the Lead to Prospect (L2P), Prospect to Order (P2O), Order to Cash (O2C) and Cash to Lead (C2L) phases.
The aim is to design smartly aligned processes between the Wienerberger Building solution (WBS) and Wienerberger Piping solution (WPS) and build one Wienerberger CRM to raise our customer excellence to the next level.
Who is working on the project?
The team consists of the WBS and WPS headquarter located business owners, central IT resources and people from the WPS out of 6 country organizations Austria, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Norway, Poland. So all together it is an international team of about 12 people.
It will not be easy to build one Wienerberger CRM, how do you plan to achieve it?
The program will be divided into 4 sub-projects, and every project results in a template with a defined feature set and process support. The templates will then be rolled out to every business unit and country as needed and will offer some limited local adjustments.
So what is the first step?
We are already implementing the first project, development of the Basic Template which will be rolled out as Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to our organization in Norway.
The content of the Basic covers the L2P process and integrates the SAP Marketing Cloud (MC) with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) for lead generation and MC with SAP Sales Cloud (C4C) for lead conversion and follow-up. Also, part of the Basic Template is the account integration between C4C and SAP R/3 (ERP). Integrations will be implemented with SAP CPI and web-services.
What will you do next?
Next will be the Sales Template and covering the P2O processes. Therefore, project management with the integration of external project databases is a major part as well the integration of the Offer Management Tool into C4C and ERP. The Sales Template project will be rolled out in a first step to our organization in Germany and deployed also to Norway with an execution planned for the first half of the year 2022.
I see you will be pretty busy until the middle of 2022, do you already have plans for the last 2 sub-projects?
Sure, we do. The Engagement Template and the Service Template will focus on the O2C and C2L processes. With these 2 projects we will add the SAP Service Cloud and Field Service Management applications into our toolset and extend the usage of the Customer Service module in our ERP. The Engagement Template will allow us to run an end-to-end claim management, while the Service Template will focus on the management of our Smart Solutions. Installed Base, Service Ticket management and service engineer dispatching, maintenance contracts and billing plans are just a few points which need to be covered by the Service Template.
How will you be implementing the templates into your local offices?
Once the template will be available, we need to roll it out immediately into our country organization. This will include data migration for the replaced systems into our new application landscape, user training and key user support.
When do you expect the new CRM will be fully implemented?
The development of the 4 templates shall be completed by the end of 2023. While the rollout to all our country organizations for both business units WBS and WPS will go on as we have almost 30 countries to cover!
What kind of additional team members do you need to complete this project?
We have to extend the team to support the both business owners in the alignment with the local commercial teams, help testing during the development and run acceptance tests.
In the rollout the new team members need to take care of translations, request all required data to setup the system like organization and team structure, sales territory managements and so on and train the key user. While in operation they need to support the key users and to recognize new requirements, which they then have to align on with the business owners and specify for further development.
Author: Karl Scholler, CRM Manager, Pipelife International, patří pod Wienerberger