Background: August Spark (formerly known as Team JMC) is a private equity investment firm, founded in 2016, specializing in evaluating business-to-business (B2B) service companies within marketing, tech-enabled, and business services. HigherEchelon, Inc. (HE) supported the migration of August Spark’s sales support environment from Salesforce IQ to the more robust Sales Cloud environment increasing the capture, tracking, and reporting of business investment opportunities.
Problem: August Spark implemented Salesforce IQ to capture and track business investment opportunities. As August Spark grew, Salesforce IQ was no longer able to meet sales support needs due to increases in volume and sophistication of their business. Their starting conditions when HE engaged were the following:
Solution: HigherEchelon leveraged Salesforce’s Sales Cloud features within Lightning to develop applications with tailored functionality to meet technical requirements. To deliver a sales pipeline capability, we used a combination of record types within standard account, contact, and opportunity objects. To provide contact relationship tracking capabilities, we implemented contact roles functionality and included custom roles for accounts and opportunities. An interesting twist in this engagement was the need to build and implement additional logic that auto-created stage-specific tasks upon opportunity generation to track the investment evaluation process. As we almost always do, we also implemented the Salesforce mobile app and Lightning for Gmail. Additionally, HE developed a custom home page, dashboard, and reports with real-time visibility and tracking. To make those reports and dashboards useful, we migrated 1,000 existing accounts and 5,550 contact data records from Salesforce IQ to Sales Cloud via Dataloader.io. To conclude our engagement, we conducted separate user and administrative training sessions to demonstrate new system and data import capabilities.