As Director of Customer Experience at Avigilon, a Motorola Solutions Company, Addy Burry knows more than a little about that complexity. Says Burry, “Avigilon is part of the video security and analytics division of Motorola. So we create these end-to-end security solutions that are both video and access control. And what’s interesting is we actually manufacture almost all of our own hardware, and we also produce all of our own software. As a manufacturer first, we actually sell 100% through our partner channel, and our partners have grown the business really fast. Which is great, but we got to the point where we’re processing hundreds and hundreds of these orders every single day. But it can mean getting further and further from the people who use our products.”
Avigilon found they were able to grow rapidly even without that connection to end users. Burry of B2B commerce: “You can cheat a little. Like, we didn’t have to invest in a lot of tools to keep up with end users. We didn’t have to invest in online solutions. We were able to grow our business without that.” At least up to a point.
Until recently, Avigilon’s partners actually e-mailed PDFs, and they used a combination of text recognition software and human effort to get our orders into their system. They got to the point where they were processing hundreds of PDFs a day, overloading their team and their software, and creating gaps between submission and fulfillment. That necessitated manual work with their partners and with their manufacturing functions to tell end users when products would arrive, and causing some dissatisfaction for everyone involved in this tedious process.
Avigilon partnered with Slalom. Burry on what happened next: “Slalom’s been a great partner to us. Their project with us set out to resolve two things: How do we help our partners drive their revenue and be easy to do business with, but also gather data on our end users, because we want to develop products that they love? They’ll have the Avigilon camera on the side of their building and see it every day, so it’s important they love that!”
Since Avigilon already used Salesforce, it made a lot of sense to build on that. They were able to build out a single, comprehensive view of the customer journey. They found that focusing on the customer allowed them to solve a lot of issues at once. Burry again: “B2B ecommerce sitting right on top of Salesforce meant we could leverage all that data we already had, but it also meant that by giving our partners access to that data, they would do cleansing for us. They would tell us more information about themselves as well, and make our CRM that much more powerful.” Again, focusing on the customer, they quickly saw the benefits of embedding purchasing ecommerce on client-facing software rather than product-facing software.
Avigilon’s partners are tied to tier discounts. The more partners sell, the greater their percentage. That’s something at the heart of the partnerships. So Avigilon needed an ecommerce platform to integrate those percentages without tedious manual processes—and also make room for special deals to give some room for the sales team to do their work.
Avigilon already had Salesforce for sales. Being able to take the cart from ecommerce and tie it into Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote), quoting, and advanced approvals meant they could leverage data they already had. Slalom’s engagement was in large part about the kind of configuration Avigilon needed to better focus on its core business functions, not waste time parsing PDFs. To make data sharing seamless, rather than reinventing processes they already had in place.
Burry brings it all back to that customer expectations: “Consumer habits drive business habits. So if you have it in Amazon, you’re going to start expecting it from your other suppliers. You’re going to expect it inside your business dealings as well. And we really wanted to keep up with that trend and get ahead of it, hopefully, and get ahead of some of our competitors.”
