Flatiron Resources
Strategic Salesforce Implementations

A key to business success is identifying the most valuable customers, those with a long-term relationship and recurring revenue. Salesforce is a leading platform helping identify these desirable customers, and Flatiron Resources, enables clients to achieve such success.

Demonstrating such success, Flatiron shared a case study featuring an automotive client. Flatiron collaborated with the client team, identifying the five most profitable customer types, developing personas guiding the client for future customer acquisition. Armed with these five personas, Flatiron helped design a unique pipeline process for each type. Now, each new lead is categorized by persona and follows the associated steps through the pipeline. Each persona type features both automated and staff-driven touch points guiding the lead through the pipeline. The positive outcome is demonstrably higher conversion rates. Flatiron’s Salesforce Practice Lead Noah Potter shares, “Utilizing a third-party app from the Salesforce AppExchange, we were able to automate the client’s Configure Price Quote (CPQ) process, leading to greater consistency in their quotes and reduced staff time every time a customer quote gets created.”

Flatiron delivers greater value to clients, specializing in incorporating valuable third-party consumer intelligence from companies such as Experian, including demographic, financial, and behavioral data. Continuing the case study, Managing Partner, Scot Begovich adds, “We fill in the knowledge gaps as clients don’t yet know about their customers. This was vital in identifying the best customers and creating the personas. It enabled further customization of sales and marketing messages to reach these customers with messages that resonate and build tighter bonds. Stats are available everywhere that show the benefits of connecting with prospects with the right message at the right time.” Once Salesforce is deployed and both the systematic and organizational processes are defined, Flatiron can provide clients with additional prospects meeting the personas from the data providers. Begovich offers, “Clients can choose how many prospects they want to pursue, based on client budgets and organizational capacity, which we then feed into Salesforce. The available prospect data is virtually limitless.”

Client projects rely on Flatiron’s unique engagement approach. The team at Flatiron Resources specializes in meshing Salesforce capabilities with a client’s workflow and operational techniques. The company matches the Salesforce capabilities with an organization to ensure that they are aligned with a firm’s operational workflow and not vice versa. The client engagement process typically includes three phases—assessment, development, and launch.

“We engage with our clients in different ways to carry out a well-defined communication process with them and understand their needs. We work with them in a flexible manner to build upon their existing capabilities and grow their business in new and unique ways,” says Potter. In the assessment phase, Flatiron Resources’ team members interact with the employees of an organization to gain a holistic understanding of their requirements. Thereafter, they develop the solution in such a way that the client’s needs are met and the additional work of sales representatives is minimized so that they can focus on their core tasks. Finally, in the launch phase, the company initiates the Salesforce implementation for its customers. Potter says, “Salesforce includes such a robust set of tools, but the beauty is its flexibility. The default tools and processes might require too much organizational change for the organization right away, resulting in resistance and low adoption. Instead, we incorporate what’s working well for the client and typically make gradual changes.” Flatiron believes this leads to better results and an organizational culture of continuous improvement. Their long-term client relationships prove the approach is successful, both for Flatiron and their clients.

We help clients ThriveSM by getting the most of Salesforce’s capabilities, including app extensions, to identify the best customers and find more of them

Beyond deployment of Salesforce, clients choose Flatiron to extend capabilities utilizing the hundreds of Salesforce AppExchange tools, either to reduce organization workload, e.g. email integration apps and route optimization or provide new capabilities such as call center tools. Begovich describes such tools, “We hear the term Call Center and think of off-shore phone banks with hundreds of operators. With Salesforce apps, it can be just two or three reps, leveraging auto-dialing features targeting new prospects. The scripts are customized depending on the personas, and the rep has access to the personalization data for the prospect, or the entire customer history for existing customers.”

Flatiron’s clients span several vertical industries, resulting from its client-first strategy. It functions more as a trusted business partner rather than a consultancy. It does not off-shore any of the development process, operating as a close-knit team to serve clients. It engages with clients with a diverse set of offerings, as specific as training-only or organizational assessments, or through broader full-suite implementations.