Sean Andrews, a Salesforce admin at Armstrong Steel, explains how his company used Sales Cloud tools to move 70 salespeople remote during the pandemic. Salesforce Inbox, Lightning Dialer, and Einstein call coaching automated workflows and simplified training for a complex steel product.
One of the most interesting things about working in technology is the things that I get excited about are the things that stress everybody else out.
Stress. We leave stress at the door here at Simply Put. Sean, what's up? I'm Emmanuel Acho, your host for Simply Put, where we take complex business challenges and give them easy on the brain explanations. So if you hear got bandwidth to pivot to an ideation session, we'll say simply put. Less talk. You just met Sean Andrews, the salesforce admin at Armstrong Steel, which sounds like a TV action hero, right? Dun dun, dun, dun. Armstrong Steel to the rescue. Now Sean will give us an overview of the company, what he does, introduce us to the team and lots more. You'll also hear from Fatima Mikali all around salesforce expert at sales cloud, who will help us understand what it's like at the sales department of a company.
I'll pop up throughout the episode to show how Sean and the sales team at Armstrong Steel skilled up and how your sales team can too.
Thanks, Fatima. Now let's get back to Sean.
My role is honestly primarily supporting sales. I want the sales team to be able to focus on building relationships with customers and not have to focus on, you know, spending hours and hours of doing data entry or learning different systems or, you know, click in a thousand places. It's really trying to make them as efficient as possible so they can focus on their job. So at Armstrong Steel, we're a steel building manufacturer. We take people through the whole process of designing their building engineering, engineering logistics, and we actually manufacture the buildings ourself. Here in Colorado, you know, the sales team, they don't like change. You know, a small update to Gmail or to Google Chrome and people lose their minds because it's different. I love new technology, I love implementing new things. But it's a fine line between optimizing our business without causing too much of a stir in the rest of the company. If you have a relationship built with them and you work well with them, I find it easier to explain why it's going to be beneficial for them and they're more receptive to it.
Now, your team probably doesn't sell steel buildings, but I bet you can relate to Sean. Learning new technology is hard. Changing the tools your team uses every day, that's especially hard even if you know those tools will ultimately help your sales team work better and faster. Fortunately, Sean and his team found calm on the other side of all that change.
Without Salesforce, my life would be a mess. When you have thousands of calls going in and out every day trying to identify trends with those calls. If you're doing it manually is not just difficult, it's impossible. A steel building is a complex product, and it's not unlike a car in that, you know, there's a thousand different components and pieces that make up the car. But one of the differences, everybody drives a car. Not everybody has, you know, even the slightest understanding of a steel building. The reps that come on board, they don't know anything about this product. So the training process can be very, very complex. When the pandemic first hit and we had to go remote, it was kind of a whirlwind. But all that technology allowed us go from working in an office environment, which we've been doing for years, to working in their houses, you know, 70 plus people. And we did it in a matter of a couple days, and we didn't really miss out on anything.
Sales cloud helped the team adapt to change without missing a beat and without letting their customers down. With 90% of B2B sales moving to a virtual sales model in 2020, adapting was key.
What's great about the sales cloud is the ability to integrate so many different apps and pieces into one. All these different tools that make the jobs of a salesperson easier. Things like the salesforce inbox, which integrates our gmail into salesforce, the lightning dialer, and being able to click to call through the system. Einstein call. Coaching high velocity sales. All these different pieces that we can kind of plug into the sales cloud that automate things and just make their job so much easier to do so they can focus on what their job is, and that's building relationships with customers and understanding what they need.
That right there, music to my ears. Tools that make a salesperson's job easier is what sales cloud is all about. That's because Sean and his team took full advantage of the Sales Cloud360 platform. They learned new ways to connect, got into the new scope of selling, and developed new methods for managing. So that's how Sean and the team use sales cloud to skill up. But you want more, Correct. In the next three episodes of Simply Put, we'll see how a sales director, manager, and rep each use the tools Sean talked about. Whether it's coaching sales reps on virtual selling skills or looking at a single source of truth for customer data, I'll explain the sales cloud magic that helps Armstrong steal every day. Speaking of the team, here's a preview of the characters you're about to meet.
On this season of Simply Put. You're gonna meet some of my co workers. Alex Searles is a great personality. I don't even know what I do for a living. He's always growing peppers and brings them into the office and has people try them and I don't ever eat them. But I like to sit back and watch everybody cry and run to the bathroom. Brooke Gearhart is our San sales director.
Oh, you don't want me to say that.
Brooke is also my fiance. Yeah, Work together, live together. We drive separately because, you know, you gotta have some time to yourself. And Charlie Newton, always willing to go kind of above and beyond. I can do that all day long if you want to keep going that way. They're all just great people. I love the people that I work with and we have a lot of fun together. My name is Sean Andrews and this is, simply put.
Was awesome. Sean, big thanks to you and Fatima for giving us an overview of sales at Armstrong Steel and how the team managed change and new technology during this pandemic. With the help of sales cloud, I'm learning tons. Are you? Good news. There's a lot more to come. Stay tuned for episode two, which starts right now.
