ECKART, an Altana Group company, is a world leader in the manufacture of metallic and pearlescent pigments. Based in Hartenstein, Germany, the company has a workforce of 1,700 and supplies customers from the paint and lacquer industry, the printing, plastics, and aerated concrete sectors, and the cosmetics industry. The new, integrated sales/marketing system from Salesforce grants ECKART end-to-end transparency when it comes to the company’s regional sales pipelines. The sales teams in each region can be managed using corresponding success metrics; they also gain valuable insights from the system that they can utilize in their sales activities. The new system has professionalized ECKART’s market approach to a high degree. By making the sales process more transparent and efficient, it creates the basis for generating new business and offers the company key pointers for the ongoing development of its products.
Salesforce Sales and Marketing Cloud gives us unique insights that help us coordinate our sales initiatives worldwide much better. With T-Systems, we had an experienced partner for the Salesforce implementation on our side.
The Siebel CRM tool used by ECKART’s sales staff was beginning to show its age. A highly customized system, it was not capable of making the company’s global sales activities more transparent, nor was it easy to use. For example, it did not provide information on why the sales staff had lost deals or on how strong demand for different products was in individual regions. What is more, the Siebel system was not integrated with either Outlook or the company’s ERP system; mobile availability was another glaring omission. In order to professionalize and improve management of the sales process, ECKART decided to replace the legacy Siebel system with a modern Salesforce system.
The Salesforce Service Cloud is provided on a SaaS basis. T-Systems adapted the standard solution to match ECKART’s needs. In particular, that entailed designing the interfaces with the partner systems (such as ERP) so as to create a seamless user experience and simplify work for the sales staff. T-Systems also migrated the data from the Siebel system to the Salesforce Service Cloud. In the next project step, T-Systems rolled out the Salesforce Marketing Cloud for ECKART, resulting in comprehensive process support at the customer interface and a 360-degree view of the market, the competition, and the customer. The new Salesforce systems now make it possible, for instance, to perform loss analyses and manage the sales pipeline. Sales staff are also able to clearly track the status of the dispatched product samples, meaning no leads are lost anymore.
ECKART has branch offices and agencies on all continents. Its comprehensive range of pearlescent and metallic pigments enables industrial customers to achieve stunning effects on automobiles, to protect buildings against all kinds of weather, and to enhance the look of packaging and magazines. In addition, the company provides aerosols, paints, lacquers, and powders – for coatings that achieve optical effects, have thermal properties, or are used in specialized applications.