066: How Rochester Electronics Transformed Their Business With B2B, OMS, & CRM with Linda Monroe and Tracey Corbitt

[MUSIC] Welcome to Salesforce Commerce Cloud Innovations. Each week on the podcast, we dive deep into topics that will impact your digital business, from fundamental shifts like Generative AI to the evolution of the online customer experience. Your host Natalia Pavic, product marketer at Salesforce Commerce Cloud, hopes to expand your mind with solutions available today and explore their impact on the future. Our goal is to inspire you with ideas, solutions, and visions of the future in e-commerce. Now here's net. Tracy Corbett is the director of global marketing at Rochester Electronics. She plays a pivotal role in shaping the company's brand presence and expanding its market reach. Her responsibilities include overseeing global marketing initiatives, developing customer-centric campaigns, and optimizing digital channels for a maximum impact. Linda Monroe, as the VP of Operations and Business Applications of Rochester, she oversees multiple disciplines and functions including operations and business applications. She's passionate about empowering her team to excel in their roles and contribute to the company's vision and mission. A provider of off-market semiconductor parts, Rochester Electronics had a growth boom during the pandemic. They have a fascinating story of supplying ventilator producers and participating in their nation's recovery. Both in the pandemic, they're promptly launched into a digital transformation, overhauling the way their salespeople closed deals and launching a B2B commerce site to enable self-service. I talked to Tracy and Linda about their experiences and what it was like to provide inventory visibility for 200,000 excuse. Hope you enjoy this video. Hello, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me. Linda and Tracy, why didn't you go ahead and introduce yourself? We'll start with Linda. Hi, my name is Linda Monroe and I'm the Vice President of Operations and Business Applications at Rochester Electronics and I kind of like to define myself as a back office nerd. I love everything after the order is taken. I like to optimize the processes, you know related to pickpeckship and even like when customers have issues. That's sort of my willhouse and that's what I love to do. Very nice and Tracy, I'm the Director of Global Marketing at Rochester Electronics. I have a background in digital marketing, information technology, project management and web development, which is really come together focused on digital marketing technologies at Rochester. My team is responsible for shaping the company's brand presence and expanding market reach, which includes the company, commerce site, roculeck.com. Very cool. And we'll get into your back end and front office transformation with Salesforce, which is very exciting. But before we jump into that, Tracy, why don't you give me no review of what Rochester Electronics does? So a bit of an overview of the business. Sure. So Rochester's been around for about 43 years. We partner with the top semiconductor manufacturers in the industry to support companies that manufacture or maintain products and equipment where their life cycles exceed the semiconductor components they are built with. We've received directly from these manufacturers, active and overstock and end of life components. And in some cases, intellectual property and test equipment where we take over license manufacturing of those products on our campus in Newgar Report Massachusetts. It's such a very cool business because you're dealing with sort of, you know, some of the stock that is no longer manufactured. So you're kind of keeping it alive. Now just for the audience, semiconductor is pretty important. So we'll get into that. But just for anybody wondering, it is basically it's a conductor that continues to conduct electricity at high temperatures. That's really important for machines as they get heat up as they are sort of working. But obviously there was a big boom of semiconductors during COVID. Tracy, why don't you tell me a little bit about what that was like from your perspective being in the middle of it? Yeah, that was a really scary time for everyone. So medical equipment manufacturers were trying to ramp up production of ventilators to meet the high demand. But they couldn't source the components required for their newer designs because of the shortages. Rochester was perfectly positioned to support their older ventilator designs with the products that we had available in our warehouses. This is just a great example of how Rochester supports businesses by enabling a longer lifecycle for technology. And I understand that the stock and the inventory is very important. So we'll get to that. Linda, why don't you tell me about your first part of your transformation, which was implementing sales cloud and what that was like? Yeah, so, you know, we had been doing a lot of homegrown systems. We had been developing a lot of different things. And, you know, obviously, with the semiconductor shortage, you know, we had on hand in stock inventory in our new very facility. So, you know, we had a huge scale for growth during that because again, it's Tracy talked about there were a variety of different customers that came to us to help them, you know, obviously the medical equipment, but also just people trying to keep their lines going. So we had invested almost immediately after COVID in some warehousing solutions to bring more efficiency and accuracy just to help scale the business for growth there. But it kind of left a big gap on our sales side. And I think people were kind of feeling frustrated like when's it going to be our turn? Like we need new systems, we need new processes. So Colin, who's the EVP and Nick, who's our vice president of America sales, we're starting to look into CRM solutions and they went out to Dreamforce. And, you know, obviously Salesforce was known as one of the best products as for CRM solutions, but they really did fall in love, not just with the product, but the people that they met because they really sense that the Salesforce CRM solution was going to really help, you know, help the salespeople engage further with the customers. We kind of set off on our Salesforce journey with three main objectives. One was the customer engagement, right? The customer experience and the product offer. So the sales cloud was naturally the first place it made sense to start with. So they came back from Dreamforce all excited. We brought Salesforce in for a workshop, you know, and everything lined up, you know, the partners that we had the way they helped us justify the ROI was great. So we kicked that project off in December and we went live with that in July. So that was about a six month project, but Tracy and I had a lot of pain points, which I think we'll get into in a minute, you know, Tracy being sort of the commerce website, you know, marketing and me being the back office, we were experiencing a lot of pain points. So as soon as we saw what Salesforce was offering on the sales cloud, we were both like, hey, we really want to explore what there might be for B2B commerce and order management. So before I think they had only just kicked the project off and Tracy and I were saying, can you guys come in and do a workshop with us? So that's sort of the sales cloud journey. And then we'll talk a little further about what our journey was as we, you know, started down that path. Yeah. And I think in our prior conversation, you had mentioned that obviously having gone to look, you know, from what were you guys using before Salesforce, if you don't mind me asking. We have an ERP of Epicor, we had a homegrown system and Tracy can talk about the website. Yeah. So for the front end, we were using craft commerce and craft content management system. Right. But I understand that there was a big sort of change management aspect to it. So Linda can you tell me more, was there like resistance to sort of using the app, what we call the app right away from the sales people, were they sort of not used to it? Yeah, good question. I think everybody was really eager and part of that came from the top down approach, right. So Colin and Nick were so enthusiastic about the product, you know, that that momentum carried through. So I think when we first launched, there was sort of this excitement and energized. But I think Colin even say he underestimated the user adoption because unlike the tools that Tracy and I implemented, you know, people still had access to emails. People didn't have to log opportunities, right? So, you know, you had your early adopters and people that probably embraced it and that was certainly the America's team and Nick's team. But some of the other regions were a little slower to adopt. So I think after, say, the six month mark and even now, now that we've got order management and be to be commerce loaded, I think there's a much bigger push to best practices and, you know, creating a lot more accountability as far as reporting. So we're seeing a much greater engagement with users. But again, I think it's typical right in the beginning, everybody's excited, everybody's wants to, you know, use it. I think people got frustrated when it wasn't as intuitive as they might have hoped or actually it's just a little bit more work, right? It takes a fair amount of work to load all that content into an opportunity. And you had pockets of, I don't want to say resistance, but pockets of people that weren't as quick to adapt. So now again, through a lot of different messaging and reporting and analytics and leadership, we're trying to get everybody, you know, kind of following the best practices. Well, it's interesting. I haven't been a seller myself. I can sort of tell you that I wasn't the best at keeping track of my opportunities. I was one of those that was like, I saw on the email. And so that's always an interesting, sorry, what's interesting about your stories that you went from implementing sales code CRM for opportunities and leads for the sellers, which is like the core side of the business. And then you went into that front office transformation with launching commerce. And that was sort of a quick follow up afterwards. So Tracy, do you want to tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah. So I guess the most important element of implementing the commerce platform was that it integrated with the back end of order management. So this system that, you know, Linda was implementing the best part of that is having the information all in one place so that we can have transparency to customer behavior. We didn't have that previously. The systems worked a bit in silos. If you will and then only certain information flowed back through to the ERP system. And if you wanted to report on any kind of customer behavior, you had to piece it all together like a Frankenstein, if you will. So I would say the biggest improvement has been the fact that we have visibility of customer behavior and that we can streamline our processes to give the customer experience the best you know the best experience that they can have. From a marketing perspective, it gave me increased visibility to how all of our campaigns perform across all of our buying channels and not just with commerce activity. So it's been a huge improvement. And I think even Linda and I we go into reporting. Linda pings me every so often a few times a week and did you know that you know this is we've increased you know sales this much or or you know this channel is growing and it just like I said it gives us visibility into so much that we didn't have previously. Yeah because you guys went all in you did sales cloud for opportunities and you did order management for inventory and then you did B2B commerce which is all the same you know for some calm stock. And what's interesting is that you now had the customers going in and using the commerce engine and so salespeople were like oh hang on, what's my customer ordering? Because I think a lot of people think it's one or the other right they think okay am I they're gonna use opportunities or I'm gonna use orders but they don't realize they can kind of coexist. And I think all masses like the glue so I Linda what was it like to set up I heard was it 200,000 skews or something what was it like to set up system for that. Yeah so it was it was well overdue right so you know talking about the pain points that might have led us into the journey and why Tracy and I were so eager to do the crazy thing which is start a project for one thing when the other project hadn't even hardly gotten off the ground because again in hindsight it was a lot to take on at once but Tracy I don't regret it. It was pretty crazy ride but I think I think we're in such a much better place but you know not I want to just describe what it was like right so you talk about this I'm I conduct a shortage right so you know customers knew that we had stock they were coming to us but yet we didn't have any of this automation. Most of our processes for customer service were manual right we were having the customer service team you know acknowledge the order and allocate the inventory and provide customer statuses and I mean they were going crazy trying to keep up because they wanted to help the customers but there just wasn't enough time in the day and they had to do I think Salesforce calls it the swivel right they has a look in the system and that system and you know so we we came out of the pandemic you know in that overage with just a lot of pain points about the real-time inventory I can remember one situation in particular you know because we drive ourselves for customer success right that's what we're all about but we because our inventory on the website wasn't real-time it was only refreshed daily when we were getting a lot of demand we would have a hot product right lots of people were like oh there's none in the market but Rochester has them so everybody would you know like come and try and buy it but because our inventory wasn't refreshed daily our system would take orders right so we would have a commerce customer place and order but yet a salesperson had taken that stock maybe an hour two hours ago maybe I don't know 23 hours to go right so there was one situation where Nicole who worked with me she was managing the e-commerce you know back-off as customer service team and she had to call this customer and she had to tell them I'm really really sorry but your order where you put in your credit card and you paid and you got like a you know we got your order but we don't have the stock and this woman went crazy on her she was so upset right she was frantic she's like I have thought I found parts for my line down and now I don't and you know Nicole was in tears and the customer was in tears and it's like so you can see how it was so important to Tracy and I that we get that real-time inventory because we knew it was a preventable problem we just needed the ability to do that so then you talk about what did it take right what did it take to bring that inventory into real-time so we leverage the Salesforce order management object in Omni Channel inventory so Omni Channel inventory is you know meant to carry you know you have this many parts in this warehouse location but we actually needed to bring that inventory to another level because as you can recall our semiconductor product offering like we actually have all the variations of that product in stock so here's an example let's say you go to a hardware store right and the hardware store carries three different brands of table saws right and each of those brands has three variations well now if you think about that from our viewpoint think about that hardware store carrying every single variation of that model for 43 years right so now you start getting into the complexity and the volume of those skews so to simply say we have 200,000 skews that's a pretty big thing right to keep 200,000 skews in sync between your ERP and your order management system but now you blow it out to the lot level so the Salesforce solution it hardly required I don't want to say customization but it was pretty easy for us to configure that data and then through MuleSoft we created the integrations to keep that ongoing and then we created an automatic allocation so now as soon as a customer places an order whether it be from a salesperson from a quote or a commerce customer on the web we instantly reserve that stock down to the lot level right so that allows us to have a real-time view not just of the on-hand inventory but the available to order inventory so that was really good we actually have I think over 10 billion units so again 200,000 skews is pretty you know mind-blowing but then you take that into you know 10 billion actual units within those different lots and I'm not going to say it's perfect but oh my goodness it's so much better than it was I mean we never have situations now where we're out of stock like the only thing we might have is an integration failure which almost always comes back to a data issue so it was it was fun fun as one F word we could use it was pretty challenging but you know we got through it you know that's a good point because we I don't think we've spent enough time talking about the impact of your business overall because you were keeping this over stock or older models of semiconductors are no longer being being manufactured and the reason they're no longer being manufacturers because this speed of electronic development they just come sort of move on to the next model well unfortunately there are so many machines and you know be it you know trains ventilator so many things that take semiconductors that are older that now become unsupported right so this is and what's interesting about what Rochester does is you're taking you're buying the actual design and technical specs so you can manufacture continue manufacturing new units so you're sort of serving a very pivotal role in an industry and in a place where you might need obsolescence through just electronic speed of development of electronics and so it's interesting that that inventory people get pretty passionate about you know not being able to build ventilators not being able to build things that are life-saving so it's interesting how that inventory inside just to recap what you were talking about reduces the friction with the customer and also I understand with your B2B setup or B2B commerce setup you're providing more self-service options and I understand we talked earlier a little bit about how the those customers support reps were no longer doing all of the fielding of the issues so tell me about what happened you know I understand that you put them to work in a different department you created a different department can you tell me more about that yeah so talking a little bit about further about like what that obsolescence means to customers so you know the founder of the company Kurt Garrish you know 43 years ago he was the vice president of Motorola and he really saw this need of when products are obsolete but as the company grew we actually expanded our market offer so we offer not just obsolete part but also active product right so probably half our inventory is currently sellable on the market as well as our obsolete so we're the world's largest source of supply for semiconductor and that kind of brings three different types of customers to us obviously that keep them moving kind of customer which is our core customer right that's who you talked about somebody who obsolescence provides a real challenge and they need to have that product we can sell them the finished consumer inventory we can build it just like the manufacturer did but we also have a fair amount of customers that come to us like the semiconductor shortage where we have on our shelves active inventory so we can become a one-stop shop for those people and that kicks in during supply chain disruption so we're not likely going to be the person that somebody goes to you know for their day-to-day volume right if you're buying you know hundreds of thousands of semiconductor products you're going to a mainstream channel for that but whenever that supply dries up people can come to us and then the third area where we're seeing customers come to us is for convenience sometimes it's just easier you know to go to come bees come from the farm's a convenience or just kind of buy what you need there because they have a little bit of everything so we see that talking a little bit about the impact to our customer service team you know we really set out not to you know eliminate jobs or let people go or save money but obviously we need an ROI for the project right we couldn't just spend money you know without something coming back so we saw the ROI in twofold one increased demand or orders coming from the website self-service etc but we took about half of the customer service person's job function and automated it So now half of we took we had 29 customer service reps we dropped that down to 16 and those other people were able to transition into other roles I think one of the people is actually working with Tracy now in the commerce side doing marketing stuff other people move more into business development roles So that was really nice to be able to open people up and get them out of that very manual day-to-day routine admin task and move them into something far more challenging and interesting and engage further with the customer Yeah, if I was gonna use a sort of a financial analogy you're almost like providing liquidity This is a conduct and work it so that people can find them at any time So that's really cool Tracy a little bit over to you You've mentioned that you can now see numbers and reporting in analytics So into pivot to what you're hoping to see moving forward and how AI would fit into that vision Yes, so Currently we're working with the company called magnet technology to implement our sales force marketing cloud engagement Data cloud personalization and marketing cloud intelligence that project is going live in June We're super excited and can't wait to see what we can achieve with the new marketing tech stack there All of that brings so much more visibility on top of what's new to us now, right? So much more visibility to the customer behavior Or behaviors, right because you can slice it dice it a million different ways And the plan is to just continuously Give the customer relevant content and meet the customer where they're at that has been our goal all along and These tools, you know perfectly play into that as far as AI marketing insights I just want to be able to collect all this data and then have it analyzed automatically and you know tell my team What's next? What do we do next? How do we pivot the world is constantly changing the markets constantly changing? Hopefully we never see a pandemic again, but if we do we'll be perfectly positioned once again to you know snap into place and you know and help Yeah, I mean that's it. Yeah, just being able to have that contingency right sort of like the business resiliency I think a lot of businesses are thinking about okay, what happens if Maybe not a pandemic, but maybe some other sort of worldwide event occurs How do we continue to be resilient and continue to maintain and employ people because that Continuity if I was going to use the same word again. It play is pivotal in those times when things are sort of hitting the wall That everybody can maintain their sanity maintain their jobs maintain their lives. So very fascinating how you guys Incredible story of just navigating hardship and coming through Both providing but also maintaining Supply maintaining jobs and just incredible overall and I talk to top it all all off Taking on a big digital transformation and coming out the other end as you are Last question Linda. What are you hoping to see from AI because this is obviously the year of AI Yeah, so you know We're all fascinated by AI and honestly I can do a little bit more to understand exactly what it is because it's a big word What does it exactly mean but in talking to some of our Salesforce team? You know, they're talking about that AI can help even in the RMA process like anticipating you know situations or things that would come in We leverage Salesforce flows to build a fair amount of guided selling automation and so I'd be really thrilled to see if there's more ways that we can leverage AI there we're using AI for Einstein scoring of opportunities So that's kind of exciting, but again, I think we've only just scratched the surface as far as what we could do for me Personally one thing that I'd love to see AI do is I don't know Don't we all want somebody to help us figure out what to make for dinner? I heard there's some apps out there that like can take a picture of your fridge and You know come up with a meal plan and you know heck we could tie it to Instacart right and all of a sudden get a delivery and I Mean if I can throw away fewer green beans and you know have less stress over making dinner that would that would be super cool But nothing to do with our business, but just a personal personal desire of maybe how AI could help me Showing it away fewer green beans. I think that is an excellent excellent task for AI to solve for us So ladies it has been a pleasure. Thanks, now. Thanks, and to everyone else until next time Thank you for tuning into another enlightening episode of Salesforce Commerce Cloud innovations We've got a treasure trove of remarkable discussions and insights lined up just for you in the world of Commerce Cloud To stay in the loop and never miss a beat be sure to rate review and follow our podcasts Your feedback and support mean the world to us and we can't wait to have you with us for future episodes Until next time stay inspired and keep innovating You