Scoring a Touchdown with CRM

Since 1948, Varsity Spirit Fashion has been the driving force in making cheerleading the dynamic, athletic, high-profile activity it is today.

DATED TOOL LACKS SPIRIT

Varsity Spirit competes in a fast-paced sales environment that demands complex territory sales and strategic account planning by its reps. The company relies heavily on the Salesforce platform to manage the entire business, but was looking to replace a custom-built sales planning tool that lacked the functionality and usability to be effectively used by the sales and leadership teams.

Cheering for a Feature-Rich App

Varsity Spirit relied on our custom development experience using Force.com to build a custom territory planning app to help the brand reach sales goals, surpass customer expectations, and meet production and delivery demands.

Business objectives and success metrics for the new Salesforce app included the ability to:

  • Drive overall regional and territory sales planning
  • Enable strategic account planning activities
  • Identify areas to recover lost revenue during a “fill-in” year
  • Perform competitive analyses
  • Achieve “toe to bow” in all accounts by selling across all Varsity product categories
  • Align critical customer interactions with the sales cycle

Sales Builder generated $6M in additional pipeline with “white space” accounts for its Gameday line of apparel doubling prior year’s sales.

Sales Builder Features

We were responsible for all implementation work including design, development, Sales Cloud enhancements, and enabling a bi-directional integration with the eCommerce app used by customers to customize apparel and place orders (which then feeds into Sales Builder for accurate forecasting). Development demanded managing 65,000 customer accounts and opportunities and required extensive performance tuning. Other complexities of the custom application’s functionality included:

  • Performing complex calculations of sales analytics in real-time
  • Filtering and sorting data with dynamic re-calculations
  • Detailed views of sales plans spanning eight product categories
  • Displaying customers’ sales plans exposing custom objects in Salesforce
  • Visual cues for “white space” opportunities

Doing Backflips with Salesforce

High adoption rates of the new Salesforce app have led to more accurate sales forecasting for Varsity Spirit. The app has also helped sales reps to identify greenfield accounts and leads, and provided increased visibility that enables up-selling and cross-selling of products to expand total account revenues.

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

  • Nearing 100% user adoption of the sales app
  • More than 94% of individualized sales plans were created
  • Generated an additional $6M in new pipeline with “white space” accounts for the Gameday line of apparel, doubling prior year sales

Related Work