Salesforce Transformation for Telecom B2B and Reseller Operations

The client is a key player in the Pacific telecommunications market and a subsidiary of a multinational group. Their mission is to offer a broad range of products and services tailored to meet the diverse needs of both consumers and businesses in their region. With a focus on connectivity, they aim to expand their reach across the Pacific and globally.

Their product portfolios cover everything from individual mobile plans to mobile broadband, digital media, e-commerce, and value-added services, designed to both meet everyday consumer connectivity needs and support advanced business applications.

The client ensures their team is equipped for hybrid work environments and delivers customised business solutions, addressing critical needs in ICT, cloud platforms, and infrastructure. With a solid foundation and global partnerships, they offer tailored solutions that drive business transformation, support digital growth, and optimise performance for entrepreneurs, SMEs, and large enterprises.

Regarding the client’s Data Architecture, because most of the data about clients, deals and services were recorded in a few locations, system scalability was highly hindered.

• Restricted System Scalability: Since most of the client’s data was concentrated in a few objects, tracking historical changes became difficult, and Salesforce performance slowed as data accumulated. The lack of scalability hindered efficient data management, and team members often had to input data manually without following best practices.

• Data Inconsistency and Mismanagement: The Salesforce setup was not effectively integrated with the accounting platform, which caused inconsistencies and created security concerns. Additionally, because the Product and Price books weren’t maintained within Salesforce, data accuracy and consistency suffered.

• Lack of Salesforce Best Practice: The standard objects weren’t tailored to the team’s specific workflows, making it harder for them to adopt best practice processes within Salesforce and to track the full customer journey.

• Manual Quote and Proposal Creation: The sales team spent a significant amount of time creating and updating quotes and proposals manually, which was inefficient and prone to errors.

Meanwhile, much of the sales process was still taking place outside of the Salesforce environment because the replicated system from Fiji was not set up to underpin the business in PNG’s needs.

• Manual Tasks: Minimal automated processes were inherited from the replicated Salesforce instance. The majority of business processes, including trial approval, security deposit, invoicing and subsidy calculations were highly saturated with manual and menial tasks.

• Data Security Concerns: There were major security concerns in the original instance of Salesforce whereby some users had unrestricted access to data beyond the scope of their work.

Also, Contracts were handled all through Word documents, resulting in manual and time-consuming processes.

• Time-Consuming Renegotiation of Terms and Conditions: Generating contracts and updating terms involved extensive manual updates to documents. Besides, each time the client wanted to negotiate the terms and conditions, staff members had to update the documents manually, making it hard to track contract versions and long to form a final contract that the customer approves.

• Inefficient Approval Process: There was no automated approval process in place, the sales reps had to manually ask for approvals from their managers.

In addition, the team sought a streamlined solution to onboard resellers and enable subscription management. While the Microsoft Partner team aimed to streamline their processes by onboarding resellers onto the Microsoft Partner Portal with Salesforce Experience Cloud, they needed a unified platform to reduce the license cost for the Dicker Data platform.

• Lead and Opportunity Management: Girikon set up a structure for managing leads and opportunities, by creating a web-to-lead form that captures prospects’ information in Salesforce and mapping the information captured from the prospects to Contacts, Accounts and Opportunities. Opportunity stages were enhanced with required validations to ensure smooth progression, with prerequisites enforced at each stage. For example, some fields were made mandatory at the Connection and Request Completion stages, while request details were restricted to only relevant requests.

• Contract Automation: By using tools like Conga CLM, Girikon set up a system where contracts could be generated, edited, signed, and tracked directly in Salesforce, removing the need for creating and sending contracts by hand.

• Trial Automation: Girikon integrated trial processes with Conga, automating the Trial Authorised Signatory and setting up automatic reminders for trial expirations.

• Subsidy, Products, Quote and Proposal Automation: Girikon reduced the need for the client to manually create quotes and proposals by setting up templates in Salesforce that could be automatically filled based on selected products. They also automated subsidy calculations within contracts, developed products that allow easy allocation of services to opportunities and created a proposal object to track client communications efficiently.

When the client clicks “Accept” on the Quotation, the Account Manager will receive the Email, and the status of the quote will be updated to Accepted.

• Microsoft Reseller Portal: Girikon created a reseller portal on Salesforce’s Experience Cloud where Microsoft resellers could handle subscriptions, update accounts’ details, and renew contracts. This streamlined the whole reseller team’s sales process and reduced the license cost for Dicker Data.

Reseller Portal Overview

Manage Subscriptions

Suspend Subscriptions

Renew Subscriptions

• Multi-level Approval Process: They added automatic approval steps for things like quotes and contracts, so managers didn’t need to follow up manually. This made everything faster.

• Connection and Disconnection Requests: The system Girikon set up made it easy for the client’s connection and warehouse teams to process requests, send updates, and complete tasks directly in Salesforce, reducing the need for back-and-forth emails and manual form-filling.

• Data Consistency: Girikon configured product and price book in Salesforce, ensuring accurate pricing and product data across all records and while still allowing flexibility to provide discounts depending on the resellers on a case-by-case basis.

• Privacy and Security: Girikon improvised the Salesforce Security Model to ensure that users have relevant access to the records they are supposed to view and action on, maintaining strong security and compliance across processes. For example, many contract records should only be edited by the Contracts Team or the System Administrator.