Maroline Distributing

BACKGROUND

Maroline Distributing offers consumers the most complete line of premium kitchen appliances in the world. In addition to showcasing Sub-Zero’s world-renowned refrigeration and wine storage units and Wolf’s famous cooking instruments, they are distributors of Asko dishwasher and laundry products, Best ventilation, Sirius hoods and StraussWater water purification systems. Together these brands represent the premier kitchen appliances on the market today.

CHALLENGE

They chose Salesforce as their Quote to Cash platform and selected SAP CPQ integrated with Salesforce to solve the following challenges:

Integrating end-to-end lead to cash process
Simplify selling of highly configurable and customizable products
Managing complex promotions
Managing product data and pricing
Minimize effort needed to create quotes and proposals
Enabling self-service for quotes and orders
Providing e-commerce type buying experience within a retail environment

HOW SAP CPQ HELPED

Prior to SAP CPQ, sales had to reference complex documentation and depend on SME’s to create customized offers. It took several hours to several days to put a single quote together. It was also challenging for customers to visualize all available choices. With SAP CPQ, Maroline was able to improve customer experience significantly by providing almost real time quoting capabilities and being fully transparent on available product choices and promotional pricing. SAP CPQ helped in the following ways:

Enabled Maroline to cross-sell high margin accessories, services, and related products in real time without the need for the sales or the customer to refer to printed documentation, SMEs tribal knowledge and knowledge of available promotions.SAP CPQ made upselling of warranty and installation services easy by automatically providing standard, good, best pricing options to the customer
Easy to use, highly branded CPQ interface integrated with branded Salesforce customer portal provided an e-commerce type experience in retail setting
Sales is now able to work with the customer in real time providing them with all possible choices for product selection and the impact of selected options on customer’s budget.
Shipping and taxes were automatically calculated to provide a total quote price. Depending on ongoing promotions, shipping and taxes are sometimes provided either at reduced cost or free or with matching offset discounts on products.
Offer pricing is automatically adjusted based on regional variances and available promotions
External retail sales users are able to request for special pricing and discounts from Maroline intern sales concierge where an automated approval process provides fast turn around to close the deal

RESULTS

BUSINESS

Huge customer satisfaction improvement by reducing sales errors
Self-sufficient in setting up new product configurations and pricing
On-time delivery to customers increased by enabling our supply chain team to see quoting activities trend and new orders entered live vs wait few weeks to be received by our partner
Significantly reduced time in onboarding new external and internal sales users
Quotes can be created and converted to an order at point of sale within retail environment, providing both the sales and the customer a great experience and assurance from product selection and pricing perspective

TECHNICAL

Integrated with Salesforce CRM and customer portal
Customized entire CPQ UI based on Maroline branding and marketing guidelines
Extended Salesforce Integration to support quote to order process
Integrated Salesforce custom objects by looking up clearance products, pricing, availability, and pictures in real time from Salesforce custom objects
Able to generate all configurable products through a master product configuration and product aliases working in conjunction with rules logic stored in data tables. New configurable product can be introduced simply by adding product data to data tables without having to create CPQ rules and attributes
Enabled a full Quote to Cash workflow