Softline - From hard copy to electronic lead collection

Softline is a Danish furniture company founded in 1979. It is known for its innovative, functional and high-quality furniture featuring modern and colourful designs, which is available in 61 countries worldwide

Yield

From hard copy to electronic lead collection
Historical data is logged and available on campaigns
ROI calculations available in real-time.

Softline often participates at trade fairs, where many visitors come by their stand. Previously, Softline obtained leads and contact information via product interest and business cards at the fair. Afterwards, they followed up by physically sending information to prospective customers.

Softline wanted to replace this manual process and store and share relevant information directly in Salesforce. In addition, they wanted all relevant follow-up activities logged and visible as historical data in Salesforce.

Products

The Digital Leap: Transforming Lead Collection

Before starting the configuration of the self-developed solution, various add-on solutions that could handle the scanning of business cards directly into Salesforce were investigated. However, the findings showed that it was not sufficient to use a free version as part of the solution and that an add-on solution had to be developed to capture the necessary Lead information.

By using Salesforce, the standard ’Lead’ object has been enriched with many custom fields for the user to input data into, replacing outdated paper records or excel sheets.

New Lead entries have been put into a Screen Flow. Here, users are guided through predefined steps, where only necessary information is required. The process allows the user to select which follow-up activities are relevant for them. The options are automatically displayed based on predefined criteria, making it easy to choose appropriate activities.

New Leads as well as selected follow-up activities are automatically assigned named users or pre-defined sales and service queues, based on user defined assignment rules. In addition, users can upload documents, including taking a picture of a business card and automatically saving it under the respective Lead.

Finally, when the Lead is created, it is automatically associated with a campaign (which the user has chosen as part of the set up) as a campaign member. All relevant information from the moment of entry is also saved on the Campaign Member record, enabling Softline to refer back at any time and see what detail was initially collected and recorded.

Interaction with fair visitors has been significantly optimized

Wolfgang Huegler, Head of Sales Europe: “Time spent entering information at the fair is mainly unchanged from before. The major game changer for us is that we are able to create Leads both the web application and mobile devices (Ipads). It is easy for us to follow-up as the information is sent directly to the contact persons immediately after registration in our system.

Our back office is notified immediately and does not have to wait for the Sales Representatives to come home from the fair with a folder full of documents that must be handled manually.”

Another benefit is that the backoffice can see all historical data in Salesforce on the new Lead, including New or Add-On Business, as well as if the information already exists in the system, possibly in the form of a Contact.

It took almost one week from the first alignment meeting to the finished solution going live, almost one which included the option to extract ROI calculations via the standard Campaign module in direct extension of the trade fair participation.