Conga allowed In-Situ to find a better way to analyze and manage sales' priorities

In business for over 35 years, In-Situ® Inc. is a leading manufacturer of on-site water monitoring instruments, hosted software and environmental solutions. While expanding its sales force, In-Situ’s sales leaders were looking to improve their forecasts, and to access Salesforce data more easily and effectively. With a solid Conga Composer® integration already in place for steamlined quote generation, In-Situ added Conga Grid to their Salesforce instance, improving data management and efficiency of updates, and gaining deep insight into their sales pipeline.

Challenge

In-Situ’s employees had been using the Salesforce® Forecast tab for all sales forecasting. This method of handling sales data was awkward, confusing and time-consuming; it required clicking through into the individual rep’s Opportunities, then back out again. While this gave sales management a view of individual sales reps’ deals and performance, they missed the broader perspective on the team’s total pipeline. Management needed a better way to analyze and direct the sales team’s behaviors and priorities, beginning with a more efficient method for pipeline data reporting.

What’s more, employees in other departments also couldn’t access sales data easily. Staff would re-enter Salesforce data into Word® documents to generate monthly reports for the leadership team.

At times information fell through the cracks, resulting in deals lost. Sales reps sometimes left early stage Opportunities out of their forecast reports, which could get lost in the company’s Salesforce instance. “What could be worse than having identified an Opportunity, and losing it because you just lose track of it in your CRM?” said Jason Weinberger, National Sales Manager at In-Situ.

Solution

With the help of Conga Services, In-Situ implemented Conga Grid to improve efficiency and gain better vision into their sales data. The sales team installed pre-set grids within their Salesforce org that provided filtered and collated data views.

Results

Weinberger and his sales team now can quickly and easily get the data they want without having to put together complex Salesforce reports. They can even create deep data views that aren’t available in Salesforce. “The best thing about Conga Grid is the time savings and that it’s so much easier and more intuitive to get the data that you want,” said Weinberger.

With the help of Conga Services, In-Situ’s sales team used Conga Grid to refine and streamline business processes with a focus on managing pipeline data. Weinberger can now prepare pipeline forecast reports twice as fast as previously, revising data as easily as updating a cell in a spreadsheet. “Conga Grid makes our forecast reviews so much quicker because we can drill down and get to what we want really rapidly without losing our place and having to go back.”

This has vastly deepened data insight for the entire sales team and across the organization. Weinberger and his regional sales managers gained the ability to filter, tailor and segment their sales data by parameters like territory, deal size and close date, thereby helping drive sales activities. “We can use Conga Grid to filter out all larger deals with a close date in the next 90 days above a certain value and use that data to focus our strategy in our monthly call,” said Weinberger.

Within a relatively short time in his role, Weinberger achieved 10% pipeline accuracy in aggregate in the past year—beating his target—which he credits in large part to the insight that he gained by using Conga Grid.

With universal access to pre-set Conga Grid views, employees across the company have benefited from enhanced sales data visibility. This has improved collaboration and communication, and there are fewer errors due to lost data or Opportunities being left out of reports. Sales managers can collaborate more easily when they are in different locations because everyone shares the same views of the data—and sales reps have benefited from better individual pipeline insight, to help them target the right deals to close.

• Accelerated sales data reporting and updates cut sales forecast reporting time in half, gained deep views of data and ability to quickly re-segment data views
• Improved sales pipeline insight and communication within the sales team and across the organization – achieved 10% pipeline accuracy in aggregate
• Defined workflow and drove sales process steps with single-screen view of all Opportunity–related data