# Practice Case Studies
# Purpose
This section provides students with a set of case studies in order to familiarise them with the Salesforce.com applications. The case studies provided here are targeted at beginners. They will include/are accompanied by -
Problems Expose students to real-world problems. The problems may be documented in business or technical language. Later case studies have user stories that the students need to implement.
Solution hints Help students move towards determining possible solutions, design those solutions, and implement them.
Activities and tasks Series of activities and tasks that the case studies demand.
References Occasionally, point students to resources in the training materials or on the web.
Guidance by Instructors It is recommended to have instructors handy to answer any queries! You can use standard templates to document solutions, design a solution, and document/present it to an audience (typically other learners).
# Instructions
- Case studies are typically attempted at the end of the course
- Discuss solutions with your instructors and other groups. Do not copy solutions to maximise learning
- Bring your unique perspective to the problem, and solutions
- Your approach to problem solving is more important than the final solution
- Plan to present options, design and implemented solution to the assessment panel and a select audience
On the system front -
- Create a distinct Salesforce org for case studies (unless it is a Trailhead project, in which case a Trailhead-only environment should suffice)
# Case Studies
1. Recruitment App for AW Computing
# Scenario
AW Computing has been on an upward trajectory in sales and revenue. And with that comes the need to beef up the staff across a number of departments. Ling Wu, the vice president of human resources, has asked you to help her recruiting team more efficiently handle the hiring process.
# Prepare
Install unmanaged package in your org as per Trailhead instructions.
# Develop
[Improve Data Quality][https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/projects/improve-data-quality-for-a-recruiting-app]
# Present
- Present your application
- Highlight anything unique you have done
- Discuss concepts and your understanding
2. Sales Enhancements for WatchDawg Business Expansion
# Scenario
WatchDawg Inc. has been in the professional security business for more than five years. They specialise in providing security cams for businesses and homes. WatchDawg does business only in Canada, but has future expansion plans for the US and Mexico. Recenly, WatchDawg has entered into an agreement with Google Inc. to provide Nest Hello device. They also have had some success in representing security agencies in the past, and they want to take this opportunity to offer security guard services for both office and domestic customers. WatchDawg uses Salesforce.com Sales Cloud for the country wide sales tracking, and are looking up to you to advise them and quickly implement changes for the two new LoBs. Key business objectives are –
- Offer the new product and service to existing and new customers
- Capture orders and make them distinct from opportunities. The current model is not efficient enough for tracking
- Acquire leads through the small office directory of Canada
- Capture key additional attributes from customers
- Is there manned security currently?
- If yes, name of security agency
- Number of floors
- Number of doors monitored by security cams vs. no. of doors on premise
- Square area
- Capture whether the house owner/ decision maker is a friendly
- Enable reps to start selling quickly. Track leads and opportunities more closely. Increase volume of high value customers by offering larger discounts, that need to be approved by regional managers
- Provide automated sales reports to MDs for new products and services
- Business is also looking forward to clean up the role hierarchy of their sales teams and divide them sole based on regions (and nothing else)
- They currently have CEO -> MD (North, South, East, West) -> Provincial / Regional Manager -> Sales Manager -> Sales Rep roles defined, but not strictly adhered to
You discuss with the manager, and have identified the following key objectives -
- Create new product that will be sourced from Google. It has a cost, list price tagged to it.
- Create a new service product that will have a subscription-type pricing model. The two distinct services offered are 12x7 and 24x7.
- Clean up role hierarchy so that they are aligned to the org hierarchy and the specific regions
- Capture additional attributes against customer records
- Enable reps to capture orders for all products
- Create approval flow for large discounts (greater than $20,000)
- Generate and provide reports for the regional performance
- Report out value of total opportunities captured by WatchDawg reps vs. closed opportunities
# Prepare
- Analyse the findings from your discussion with the manager to determine the changes.
- Create a process diagram and a high-level design
# Develop
- Create the app in your existing Salesforce org.
- Create at least 10 sample data points for the presentation.
# Present
Present your applications along with your thoughts on-
- Managing products, pricebooks
- Opportunities and orders – similarities and differences
- How will you get customer references from Google?
- Will it better if you are on the partner portal enabled on Google rather than creating your own sales engine?
3. Sales Implementation for MD & Company
# Scenario
MD & Company is headquartered in Bangalore. It is known for its packaged foods including –
- Good Potato Chips
- Better Tapioca
- Good Noodles
- Good Coco Cookies
MD has generated moderate interest in South India with its products, but a lot of its operations are in Karnataka alone. MD operates through a chain of distributors, large retail and wholesale chains including Big Bazaar, Nilgiris, and Metro.
MD wants to improve its prospects in South India in the next one year. It has drawn up an aggressive plan to recruit more sales reps in four Southern states, revitalize the IT systems to provide a good base for future country expansion, and grow top-line revenue by at least 20% YoY.
The Sales Director has asked for your assistance to create a Salesforce based system for their sales reps and managers. He has laid down the following high-level objectives for you to think through and suggest future course of action.
- Implement a common system for sales reps and managers. The system should scale for Distributors in the future
- Create a sales organization that starts from Chief Sales Officer, Sales Director, State Sales Leads, Zone Sales Leads and Sales Reps. Seamlessly share data between the different groups, but let them focus on the data that is relevant to them
- Reps should be able to access past and future business prospects of large retail and wholesale chains, but are not interested in seeing Distributors who are local to specific zones
- Reps should be able to create and manage opportunities, create leads, accounts and contacts, and track their activities on a calendar
- Reps should be notified of any changes to account and contact information of large chains
- Managers should be able to see their subordinate calendars, and customer records to back them up in case of non-availability
- Managers must get summary reports of performance –
- Opportunities created, open and closed in reporting period (weekly)
- Sales performance history (quarterly)
- Deals that are less than Rs. 25,000 should be reviewed by State Sales Leads
- Distributors must be kept notified on the opportunities that have reached negotiation stage to seek their inputs
- Distributors must be notified about closure of opportunities within a day of closure
- The application must be available on mobile and through browser to enable reps and managers to access and update information on the go
# Prepare
- Prepare a chart of users of application and the hierarchy
- Think through how you will enforce the security rules, approvals and workflows
- Think through the data visibility requirements
- List the processes and map them to stakeholders
- Create high-level design
- Identify the Salesforce components that you need to use
# Develop
- Create the app in your existing Salesforce org.
- Create at least 10 sample data points for the presentation.
# Present
- Your design, process flow, and parties with access to your systems
- What are the advantages and constraints of the data sharing model?
- How can distributors be seamlessly embedded in the processes?
- Your views on reports and dashboards
4. Service Implementation for Groot Life
# Scenario
Groot Life is in the business of medicinal research and manufacture for two years. They are head-quartered in New Delhi and have operations in Southern Asia.
Groot has two products in the market currently –
- Grutol – acetaminophen base (think paracetamol)
- Kipirin – an acetylsalicylic acid based drug (think aspirin)
Groot uses SAP its sales and back-end operations. Although they have a functioning operational system, they are looking at optimizing existing business processes and bring customer centricity in their support processes.
The CTO has decided to use Salesforce to revitalize customer services for Groot. The customer services mainly take care of –
- Operating call centres in India and Bangladesh. They have toll-free numbers in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar
- Operate a support website where health care professionals and consumers can check on any existing issues in Groot products, provide feedback and log complaints.
- Collate inquiries, feedback and complaints from their call centre, the support website and the main website of the company. These requests typically have a product associated with them, and
- Service Rep will evaluate the inbound request and determine whether they need quality attention. She will assign request to Quality dept. for further investigation
- Any sales inquiries are passed on to sales dept, which work on SAP
- For the rest, Service Rep provides schedule calls with the requester if needed, discusses the issue with internal departments, document and share answers to requester and close tickets
- Service department has the following structure
- Service Lead (Country)
- Service Manager
- Service Rep
- Country Service Lead reports to COO, who in turn reports to CEO
The key objectives for the Service implementation are -
- Create and track service requests. Notify the requester whenever there is a change in status
- Fully auditable actions. Meeting records, any activities and updates must be logged and traceable to the support personnel
- Ability to surface any complaints that may impact the entire batch of medicines
- Track support efficiencies – average time to close tickets, activities around support tickets, type of tickets. It will be delightful if the metrics can be tracked at the call centre level and rolled up to the organization
- Service Manager is concerned about his own operations, while Service Lead wants to know what is going at the country level. COO is concerned with overall services
- All of the roles up to the COO logon to Salesforce
# Prepare
- List the processes (preferably in a process flow) and map them to stakeholders
- Create high-level design
- Identify the Salesforce components that you need to use
# Develop
- Create the app in your existing Salesforce org.
- Create at least 10 sample data points for the presentation.
- Test results should match records in the app – do not modify records once tested.
# Present
- Your design, process flow, and parties with access to your systems
- Your view of support from AppExchange for the given business problem
- How is Service different from Sales?
- What will help support personnel do their work quickly – through thousands of service requests coming their way on a monthly basis
- How can sales and service collaborate across systems?
5. M&A Deal Management for IABD
# Scenario
IABD Inc is a technology service company that works with customers in three regions across the globe. IABD provides technology implementation services on Mainframe, Java and HTML/Javascript.
The company was moderately successful in the ten years of existence, but it shot to fame with a recent acquisition of Wow DevOps Inc. The deeper knowledge about DevOps and the reliability of IABD combined to create a good market buzz for IABD and resulted in an unheard of 15% YoY revenue growth.
Excited by the outcome, the CEO has decided to scout for potential acquisitions in the same league as Wow DevOps. IABD already uses Salesforce.com sales solution to keep track of sales and the CEO was interested to know what else Salesforce could do for her. She has asked you, the humble but proud SFDC admin, on what could be potentially done to create a process around evaluation of companies for acquisitions and mergers.
Although CEO has not provided any documented rules, you have made your observations and got them validated by business –
- There is an interim consultant brought in to provide consulting services for evaluating potential acquisitions. He is referred to as “M&A Consultant”
- M&A consultant evaluates market presence of companies in the same regions as IABD, creates an overview of business model and revenue
- Potential candidates are sent for approval to country MD. After the regional MD, either one of CEO and CFO need to mandatorily approve the deal. CEO or CFO do not login to Salesforce, but MD may also want to track progress within the system
- M&A consultant consults with his own company consultants in the three regions, and gets intel on ground. He typically does not document them but has meeting notes in OneNote
- Due to sensitive nature of the deal, the information is not shared to MDs or any other leaders in IABD
- M&A consultant proceeds to organize meetings with the target company leadership and sets a plan in motion
- M&A consultant accompanies MD/CEO on further meetings and negotiations. He is responsible to keep the tracking system updated.
- The M&A deal is thereon closed or cancelled depending on the outcome of negotiations – this can take up to 3 months.
- A closure or cancellation mail has to go to MD, CEO and CFO
- A 'thank you' mail is sent to the CEO/designated leader from the candidate company – regardless of outcome. Contacts must be deactivated if the deal does not go through
- Any expenses for M&A are logged against the deal. CFO is particular about expenses being within the acquisition budget for the year
- Monthly reports have to be sent to CEO, CFO and MD on the status of M&A, budget and expenses
# Prepare
- List the processes (preferably in a process flow) and map them to stakeholders
- Create high-level design
- Identify the Salesforce components that you need to use
# Develop
- Create the app in your existing Salesforce org.
- Create at least 10 sample data points for the presentation.
- Test results should match records in the app – do not modify records once tested.
# Present
- Presentation should call out the in and out of scope items
- How did you plan to build this out? What went right and what could have gone well?
- Your design, process flow, and parties with access to your systems
- Your view of support from AppExchange for the given business problem
- Enabling access to third parties – what are your thoughts and final decision
- Working with partners (& other third party). When should they have access to Salesforce?
- Your defined role-hierarchy
- Email templates and email communication – your options and final implementation. What are the steps you can take to avoid sending emails during your testing?
- Role of salesforce in enabling a system that is outside the “normal” CRM flow