Ann Baker - Englhard Consulting Testimonial

Speaker: Ann Baker, Director, Business Systems , Edmentum

Ann Baker: Hi, my name is Ann Baker, and I am the Director of Business Systems at Edmentum. Edmentum has comprehensive research-backed learning acceleration solutions that empower and support educators and students. I lead a team of Salesforce administrators who are also administering systems integrated with Salesforce such as Conga.

Ann Baker: I had worked with Rich Englhard and his team at my last job, where they implemented Conga for us. Uh, so when I came to Edmentum and saw that we did not have a good e-signature solution, I worked with Rich to implement Conga Sign, Conga Composer, and Conga Contracts for Salesforce for both our sales and legal teams. And then because of their experience with Salesforce and Salesforce CPQ, I brought them in on a large project to optimize CPQ so we could start using the out of the box features and functionality, which would increase efficiency and make our processes scalable and repeatable. We had many over customized builds in Salesforce from prior to and during the pandemic, and those needed to change in order for us to successfully run our business.

Ann Baker: Rich and his team um have been really great at helping us realize different options and solutions to the problems that we have. A lot of the challenges that we faced is with um processes that are not scalable and repeatable, that have been overly engineered and that were built for our business um pre and during the pandemic. Um, everything was moving at crazy speed for education companies, and, you know, we stood up some processes during that time that were not thought through enough to take us into post-pandemic world. So now we're look, you know, in reviewing those, we see that there's a lot of things that we needed to change, and Rich and his team have really helped us identify where those issues are coming in and helped us use the out of the box functionality of Salesforce and Salesforce CPQ specifically. Um, we had, uh, just some processes that were really inefficient, and we're relying on people, um, making things very manual, and they have helped us automate a lot of that. And um helped us, you know, kind of reverse some of the engineering that we did, so that we're using the functionality that's out of the box, um, which means that we can, you know, benefit from all of the features that come with each update and that have been part of Salesforce CPQ for a number of years. Um, they also helped us with a service cloud project, which that one has just wrapped this month, and that is, uh, really. Bringing efficiency to the support team that is working with cases every day and using omnichannel really helped us, um, you know, magnify the usage of that. And, and as a result, our sales leaders, excuse me, our support leaders have been able to, um, get metrics that they've never had before, you know, about the time that it takes to close the case and how long things are sitting, uh, once it's been started, uh, or not. And uh that's just been a huge boost to uh their ability to lead their teams.

Ann Baker: Because of some, I'll just say jacked up processes and builds that we had in Salesforce, um, amendments were very difficult to do. And so we had, and when we needed to amend a contract in Salesforce CPQ. There were um a few situations where we could actually use the amend functionality. Um, even though we did make some adjustments to it, but we're mostly returning or canceling an entire opportunity and then creating a new opportunity which we would take that original order, that quote, and the products on it, and make the adjustment, whether that was removing quantity or product, adding quantity and product. There are a couple other scenarios where we need to do that. So that was creating. You know, 2 additional opportunities in the system. And so if you're, if you're trying to review you know, an accounts opportunities, and you have 3 in there, and one is to reverse, or to cancel, and then one is like the revision opportunity. It's very difficult to understand the story there, and to understand exactly what opportunity is correct, and when it was correct, and you would sometimes have accounts that have multiple of these scenarios. So with the work that Rich and his team did. To help reverse out that old process, we now are using amendments out of the box as they are intended to be used, and we are amending contracts for anything subscription, um, whether that's an addition of a product, a quantity or or or um subtraction of those, um, and then there's some other situations where, like, if we want to, if the entire order needed to be canceled, that we are using that functionality. And so that is minimizing the amount of confusion on every account, and it's using the system as it was intended to be used, and as it works amazingly, and that is helping also our sales operations team and our orders and provisioning team to understand exactly what is going on within an account, and what they have to provision, and so forth. Uh it's been a huge Improvement in uh functionality and in process, and that is, you know, attributed to Rich and his team.

Ann Baker: I've had a great experience working with Rich and his team, um, and because of the initial experience that I had, I brought him and his team into Edmentum as well. Um, they are knowledgeable, they are extremely easy to work with, um, and they are great at solutioning at taking what it is that you're seeing or or trying to envision and and making that a reality. Um, they're very flexible in their thinking, and, um, yeah, I mean just between Rich and and everyone that he has there, uh, their combined knowledge um of the business of a business and of Salesforce, Salesforce CPQ and Conga, um, is really, is really excellent, and I highly recommend them.