Blue Bird
On the Road to Improved Sales
What if...we could create a single, real-time view of customers and sales data?
Blue Bird is the leading independent designer and manufacturer of school buses, with more than 550,000 buses sold since its formation in 1927 and approximately 180,000 buses in operation today.
No Clear Route With Siloed Sources and Disconnected Processes
Disparate and siloed legacy systems left Blue Bird with no single source of truth for customer and dealer data. These systems were dependent upon expert individuals managing and inputting critical sales data into back-office systems without any formal processes in place. This inhibited productivity and took valuable time away from the business of selling buses.
We were engaged to transform the company’s infrastructure and system architecture by implementing the Salesforce Sales Cloud customer relationship management (CRM) platform to support and improve sales and business processes. Salesforce would serve as the single source of truth for sales data, provide configure, price, quote (CPQ) software, and provide Blue Bird with an economic catalyst for future digital transformation.
We met with stakeholders to gain a clear understanding of the company’s strategic vision, and created a proposal that was transformational, not transactional, and introduced our deep experience and expertise with service and solution offerings that would help meet these goals.
Blue Bird recognized the importance of preparing stakeholders for the many changes involved with both adopting a newly standardized process, as well as helping them understand how the new technology would simplify and optimize their work. Our organizational change management (OCM) team was asked to prepare the internal sales team to serve as the pilot group.
A Smoother Ride for Sellers
Blue Bird needed to transform its infrastructure, system architecture, and customize Salesforce to create an integrated single source of truth for customer and dealer data. In addition, the company lacked a standardized sales process and needed to deliver operational efficiency across the organization.
We implemented Salesforce and integrated multiple back-end systems into Salesforce Sales Cloud with the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform. We leveraged custom metadata types to simplify changes to Apex sharing, trigger logic, change data capture, and parameters sent via canvas app. This generated accurate data in real-time to allow Blue Bird to confidently make critical business decisions.
With account, contact, and activity management in place, Blue Bird can manage leads more effectively and monitor pipeline more accurately. Critically, automated administrative tasks allow sellers to close deals faster and easier than before.
Getting Users On Board With the Improvements
Blue Bird needed to improve business operations, build competitive advantage, and drive down costs. Our management consulting team conducted process maturity workshops to assess Blue Bird’s current state and establish the path to operational excellence.
The team then worked alongside our organizational change management experts to execute a quick-start solution to assess the impact the Salesforce CRM implementation would have on the business, while gathering key stakeholder insights to design appropriate end-user communication and training plans.
Our creative approach to problem solving transformed these complex ideas into actionable strategies and activities to deliver transformative results, while driving user engagement and adoption.
Blue Bird is now well-equipped to manage dealer and customer relationships with improved account and contact management. The company also has better pipeline visibility and a streamlined quoting process.
Results
Paving the Road to Digital Transformation
Blue Bird is now well-equipped to manage dealer and customer relationships with improved account and contact management. The company also has better pipeline visibility and a streamlined quoting process.
We increased stakeholder engagement and buy-in to a standardized, companywide sales process that gives internal and external users a single, real-time view of customer and sales data in the CRM platform.
The company met its objectives for a successful platform implementation, including:
- Increased stakeholder engagement and buy-in to successfully implement a standardized, companywide sales process
- A strategy and methodology to ensure CRM adoption by the external dealer network
Our track record of Salesforce success – combined with our ability to integrate solutions and services expertise for Salesforce, MuleSoft, management consulting, and organizational change management – allowed us to deliver the solution Blue Bird needed to achieve its digital transformation goals.
