Sometimes the answers busy sales teams need already exist within their tech stacks. The Home Depot Retail Media+ team knew selling ad space on The Home Depot website had great potential, but the revenue stream wasn’t flowing as freely as they knew it could.
That’s when the team looked to Sercante for guidance. They wanted to understand how to increase ad revenue from the company’s retail sales website using Salesforce CRM features that were already available to them.
Here’s how Sercante and The Home Depot partnered to significantly increase ad revenue from HomeDepot.com while simultaneously increasing the CRM database and enabling sales forecasting that wasn’t possible before. The collaborative solution earned a 2022 Salesforce Partner Innovation Award in the Retail category.
Challenge Accepted: Tapping Existing Salesforce Resources to Get Things Moving with Ease
The teams at Sercante and The Home Depot had clear goals in mind when they partnered with one another to fully utilize the resources available to them.
The primary goal was to tap into the underutilized ad revenue stream from the company retail sales website at HomeDepot.com. However, the teams had several challenges to overcome before they could reach that goal.
Although other divisions of the company were already longtime Salesforce customers, the Retail Media+ team was newer to the platform and, as a result, many standard Salesforce features weren’t being utilized. Additionally, the first round of org customizations supported disconnected sales processes that weren’t adaptable to their quickly-evolving systems and growing team.
The Solution: Coordinating Existing Features to Unify the Sales Process
Sercante and The Home Depot Retail Media+ team partnered to create a flexible and scalable solution that supported a unified sales process while making better use of the technology tools available.
Bringing the team together in a single, unified sales process was crucial for ensuring efficiency, transparency, and accuracy. And a key element to achieving this was ensuring that the right team members got the right tasks at the right time for both Account management and to keep an Opportunity moving forward from stage to stage.
The two teams brought about this solution by implementing powerful, but sometimes overlooked, Sales Cloud features. These included:
- Customizing the Opportunity Path to reflect every step in a Retail Media+ Opportunity from New to Closed and then, to ensure that end users know the purpose of each stage and what info and tasks are needed within each, they called out the most important data points using Key Fields and provided explainer text in the Guidance for Success sections.
- Implementing the use of Activity Management for end users, which creates a single source of truth for tracking the many tasks needed to support the Retail Media+ sales cycle.
- Setting up Account Teams to automate record visibility and to further solidify and add transparency to users’ roles and responsibilities across the rapidly growing CRM database and team.
- Creating Flow automations that are powered by Opportunity Path settings and Account Teams to automate task assignments, improve the visibility of key data, and loop in the right person at the right time so deals progress without a hitch.
Improving Documentation Processes
While implementing the upgrades outlined above, Sercante’s Salesforce consulting team also spent a significant amount of time establishing a standardized documentation process for The Home Depot Retail Media+ team, which was essential for two reasons. First, simply put, it’s best practice to document every customization and change made inside a Sales Cloud org and even more crucial when an org is evolving quickly. Second, the Retail Media+ team projected a significant amount of team growth in the near future and needed to be able to quickly onboard new end users.
Results: Increasing Revenue, Growing the CRM, and More
Overall, the project included several moving parts and required careful planning from multiple teams. And these results not only confirmed it was energy well-spent, but also far exceeded everyone’s expectations:
- The Home Depot Retail Media+ team saw a revenue increase of 44% YoY.
- The team enabled sales forecasting that wasn’t previously possible.
- They increased the CRM database by 400% YoY.
- They’re able to set up Salesforce Accounts for suppliers before or within a week of activation.
- They enabled improvement on revenue that was previously swept to margin YoY.
2022 Salesforce Partner Innovation Award Winner: Retail Category
The collaboration between the Sercante team and The Home Depot Retail Media+ team in this story was so powerful that it became an award-winning solution. The teams were selected to share a 2022 Salesforce Partner Innovation Award in the Retail category.
The 2022 Salesforce Partner Innovation Award recipients were honored by Salesforce at an award reception that took place during Dreamforce 2022 in San Francisco, CA.
Check out all of the 2022 Partner Innovation Award Winners here.
Replicate These Solutions in Your Salesforce Org
When looking to make Salesforce a single source of truth about your customer, it’s critical to track the right data, at the right time, and make it visible to the right people.
The opportunity management solutions we implemented lean on best-practice functionality. That includes features like Account Teams, Activity Management, Flow, Opportunity Path and Key Fields that companies large or small can learn from to better manage their pipeline.
With easy setup for the admins and end users, their use of opportunity management is sustainable and scalable and showcases Salesforce standard functionality at its best.
Ready to implement solutions like these in your own Salesforce org? We know you can do it! And we’re always here if you need help along the way. Drop us a line to get in contact with us.