Salesforce | Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

Salesforce delivers 1% revenue forecast variance with Certinia Professional Services Automation Software

By replacing disconnected project processes with a unified, Salesforce-native platform, Salesforce connected teams, data, and workflows to improve forecast accuracy and drive growth.

Summary

Salesforce’s mission is to empower businesses to redefine customer engagement. Slowed by project disconnects, the enterprise turned to Salesforce-native Certinia Professional Services (PS) Cloud, and Services Estimator solutions. These provided the company a unified platform with end-to-end, real-time visibility, propelling Salesforce’s mission to new heights.

Bio

Salesforce, the leading provider of customer relationship management (CRM) technology, helps over 150,000 businesses worldwide stay ahead of customer expectations through data tools, analytics, and other best-in-class CRM solutions.

Products

Professional Services (PS) Cloud | Solutions Customer Success (CS) Cloud | Solutions Services Estimation

Industry

Software

Company Size

Enterprise (10,000+ employees)

Results

With real-time visibility across the enterprise, Certinia empowered Salesforce to forecast more accurately, scale more efficiently, and make faster, data-driven decisions.

0 %

revenue forecast variance

0 / 0

real-time project status visibility

0 %

increase in project creation

The challenge for Salesforce

Overcoming project disconnects to deliver exceptional services

Prior to Certinia, operational complexities from using two disparate systems prevented Salesforce from achieving a more customer-centric operation.

Their primary pain points were:

Limited project visibility and control: Using a decentralized system created data silos, keeping teams from getting a comprehensive view into projects and project profitability.
Data challenges due to manual data entry: Logging information from one system to another manually increased the risk of teams encountering data inconsistencies across the business.
Time-intensive data retrieval: Teams spent hours manually retrieving and compiling information across disconnected systems, hampering speed and efficiency.
Limited real-time collaboration: Operating on a decentralized system prevented automatic data synchronization across the business. This led to redundant processes and delayed responses during project creation, turnover, and management.
Overburdened services operations: Operations was overwhelmed from acting as the sole point of contact for all project queries, leading to workflow bottlenecks.

After running other professional services automation (PSA) solutions side-by-side with Certinia, Salesforce chose to streamline operations with Salesforce-native PSA by moving its entire services organization to Certinia PS Cloud.

Most customers don't want to worry about back-end systems, but they want them to be reliable, scalable, and they want their supporting partner to understand them.

Mark Conklin

Senior Director of Operations, Salesforce

How Certinia helps Salesforce

Deploying a unified business automation software for professional services with end-to-end, real-time visibility

Certinia and Salesforce teams met to determine best-fit solutions for Salesforce’s goals and issues. Salesforce gaining a single platform that offered real-time visibility into the full lifecycle of every project—from initial sale to the end execution. From assignments and resource requests to full-cycle budgeting and managing billable hours, PS Cloud catered to every division’s needs, so no project customization was necessary. Moreover, Certinia’s Services Estimator helped boost Salesforce’s sales team’s efficiency.

Project creation and management automation

By using a single platform, Services Operations automated previously manual tasks, including entering hours, managing budgets, and allocating resources. The team saw mouse clicks for deal bookings drop by 72% and daily project creation soar to double the previous numbers. They also experienced a bonus benefit: the operations team was free to focus more on building custom solutions, such as project management portals, and launches for external clients.

Data centralization

Moving operations to a unified business automation software provided Salesforce departments one source of truth. With a centralized database, the company experienced data consistency and addressed their presenting problems: limited visibility, data errors, time-consuming data extraction, fragmented divisions, and delays from having Services Operations act as the sole point of contact for all project queries.

Resource management with the Resource Planner

Certinia's Resource Planner, a tool for finding, viewing, and managing resources, saved users several hours per week originally dedicated to data entry. By giving project managers visibility into hours entered versus hours assigned, the resource planner helped them track billable hours, manage resource forecasting, and adjust swiftly when budgets fell off track. Plus, the planner generated monthly utilization calculations in real-time—a 100% decrease in time compared to Salesforce's previous record of two weeks.

Competitive and accurate estimates with the Services Estimator

The Services Estimator empowered Salesforce to prepare compelling estimates that seamlessly transformed into resource requests and projects. With the estimator, the enterprise projected a reduction in scoping steps by 84% and reduction in review and approval steps by 72%. They saw a marked decrease in manual work, acceleration in deal closure and revenue recognition, and improvements in revenue forecasting accuracy by using PSA software and the estimator combined.

In the last three years alone, we've integrated 10 companies, added 7000 users, managed revenue forecasts to 1% variance +/-, increased our billable hours by 20M a year, and are pushing $2.5B through the app.