TissueTech, a leader in innovative biotechnology, has streamlined its order management process and enabled a more user-friendly experience after creating an internal sales ops app.
TissueTech is a leader in innovative technologies using products derived from human amniotic and umbilical cord tissues. The company is advancing regenerative medicine with 600,000+ human clinical applications and 380+ peer-reviewed publications.
Sales System Manager Nick Labrada shared how his team used the Skuid Salesforce app builder to create an internal sales ops app that made its order management process more streamlined, integrated and user-friendly.
Originally a customer service rep at the company, Labrada moved into an analyst role focusing on Salesforce optimisation. Today, he’s a Salesforce admin.
“I’ve always had a desire to improve processes and make an impact,” Labrada said.
That opportunity came to fruition in a big way. The company realised a key piece of its sales process wasn’t scaling with company growth.
When a sales team outgrows its order management process
Prior to using Skuid, TissueTech’s order process was heavily manual. The workflow was lengthy and the user experience suboptimal. Sales reps would secure orders for the customer service team to log in the company’s ERP system, kicking off the fulfilment process.
For every order placed, reps must provide 17 to 20 data points to ensure the product’s safe, on-time arrival. In most cases, the company’s premium products must be shipped overnight, adding complexity. With a manual process, each expensive shipment had a large margin for error and any mistakes on the front end meant a poor customer experience.
TissueTech has more than 50 Salesforce users and initially the sales system team gave reps a basic order form to standardise the process. But the form lacked pricing controls and had no connection to Salesforce data.
“A rep would have Salesforce open on their phone and then be typing the data needed to place an order into their iPad,” Labrada said.
The inefficiencies became more evident when TissueTech’s pricing model grew in complexity, along with its approval management process. While the initial order form helped the team get organised, the company had outgrown it and the executive team wanted change.
Reps needed pricing logic to uncomplicate the process for the customer service team. The company also needed order traceability, formal reporting and a better way to track KPIs.
Salesforce could address TissueTech’s needs for almost everything. The big missing piece? A strong user experience.
“We weren’t able to deliver the custom branded solution,” Nick says. “We knew that if we wanted to achieve something without a third-party solution, we’d have to go to a developer.”
How TissueTech reps gained a consumer-grade order management experience with a custom app
When it came to the new configure, price and quote (CPQ) app, a branded solution was key. TissueTech reps also cared about user experience and performance.
In less than eight weeks using Skuid, TissueTech built a custom, mobile-friendly app that reps could use at their desk or on the go, drastically improving the order management workflow. All without writing code and with a thoughtful Salesforce UI design for better user experience.
Using Skuid, TissueTech built an order management wizard that guides reps through a shopping cart experience. They start with a product selection screen and from there, the system efficiently gathers all the data points needed to correctly process an order.
At the outset, reps select an ‘add product’ button that calls TissueTech’s product catalogue from Salesforce. For the shopping cart experience, a panel slides out over 70% of the screen so reps can see the product in the cart. With Skuid, they have the flexibility to set that sliding percentage to whatever they’d like.
To build this feature, TissueTech used the action framework within the Skuid Composer to call Salesforce Flows and Process Builder. The Composer is where the page-building magic happens. As a managed package, Skuid inherits everything in Salesforce and Skuid models bring organisation’s data into the pages they build. It is possible to have as many models on a page as required.
With the CPQ app, the ‘add product’ button retrieves product and pricing details and opens the sliding panel. By using a sliding panel, TissueTech optimised page performance because the product data only gets loaded when retrieved by the ‘add product’ button.
As for controls, once the rep starts adding products to the shopping cart, a message alerts them that they already have an item in their cart. The app doesn’t stop them from adding more products because there are scenarios where they could add multiple items. It simply warns them in case they’ve made a duplication error.
Once the user moves to the shopping cart, quantity and price are required. There’s an additional useful feature – a pricing history button – so that reps can retrieve Salesforce invoice data showing what a customer paid in the past. It’s a quick reference so the rep doesn’t have to navigate away – which keeps them efficient – and it’s especially helpful for new reps who don’t know customer pricing history.
Order traceability
Given that TissueTech reps work with doctors to identify product opportunities, the company strives to be as physician-centric as possible. But doing so requires capturing more data and the ability to tie all orders back to the doctors who placed them.
The new app’s ordering experience retrieves a list of doctors associated with a practice so the rep can make the right selection. If a new doctor doesn’t appear in the list, the rep can add that person by retrieving their information from the Salesforce database and associating them with the account, all without leaving the order form.
Reps also have the option to tag physicians as favourite if, for example, a practice has 20 different doctors. When the rep selects a favourite, the app saves that information and the doctor will be at the top of the next order form.
And when the company wants to understand which doctors ordered which products, it can retrieve this information via Salesforce reporting.
Approval management made easy
Prior to the CPQ app, the approval management process was entirely manual. When the approver perceived a discrepancy, they would email the rep’s manager, wait for a response and emails back and forth would ensue. One problem with this approach, aside from inefficiency, is that it put orders at risk of missing delivery deadlines.
With the new experience, once the rep has collected all order details, the app helps them document any exceptions on pricing and shipping, which speeds the approval process.
Now the team is gathering important data points and helping speed the approval process with concise justifications for decisions made. Streamlining the process also means that multiple groups at TissueTech can now provide approval instead of just one person.
When an order doesn’t require approval, through conditional rendering the app surfaces a button that lets the rep complete the order. For those orders that do require approval, the app routes those through the Salesforce approval process.
The way TissueTech wanted to show and hide these buttons in native Salesforce would normally require customisation and writing code. With Skuid, TissueTech did it declaratively.
When a rep closes an order, the Skuid action framework creates a case in Salesforce and drops it into the customer service queue for fulfilment.
What it’s like to build an app using Skuid
Labrada has no development experience but with Skuid, that doesn’t matter.
He insists no code was required to build the CPQ app. Pairing Skuid with Salesforce, the TissueTech sales systems team has dramatically accelerated its discovery-to-deployment process, allowing it to respond to business needs as rapidly as they arise.
The company can now better track sales-related KPIs, has gained order traceability, improved reporting accuracy and made huge user experience enhancements for both its reps and customers.