Helping Dennemeyer close deals faster in the world of Intellectual Property

A recent webinar revealed what it takes to move from manual to automated quote management at Dennemeyer by Fluido and Documill. Listen to the podcast, watch videos, or read all about it in this article.

1. What is Dennemeyer

Most companies hold patents and trademarks. Dennemeyer serves them by delivering services across the whole life cycle of Intellectual Property. Over 900 of their employees worldwide are filing patents, managing recurring patent fees, and determining the value of patent portfolios for clients such as Airbus and L’Oréal.

2. Dennemeyer & Salesforce

Dennemeyer has experienced significant growth and success in the past decade. It was therefore necessary that systems supporting the sales organization scale along to keep up with the pace. Salesforce was introduced as the foundation of their sales processes and together with Fluido, a leading Salesforce consulting partner, end-to-end processes were implemented. This enabled them tracking and analyzing their operations so that salespeople could better optimize their selling time in front of the customer. Dennemeyer and Fluido are now working closely together, from idea to deployment, to streamline document-centric processes that are ready to scale up as the organization grows.

3. Dennemeyer & Fluido

Fluido started with a complete Salesforce refresh which was necessary to clean up old configurations that were no longer needed for easier maintenance in the future. They continued by revising Dennemeyer’s product structure and price book model in Salesforce so that recurring and non-recurring services can be easily distinguished from each other. Handover automation for new or departing employees was set up between Sales and Operations by bringing all information from disparate systems such as emails to Salesforce. Finally, better quote management was introduced by enhancing Salesforce Quote object reporting, which resulted in productivity gains inside Dennemeyer’s sales teams.

4. Quote management: the starting point

Dennemeyer’s goal was to ensure quotation traceability to learn from past mistakes and have a clear guidance on what a quote should look like and what it should include. The desired result was to reduce the time for salespeople to generate quotations and simplify the onboarding process for new sales hires.

5. Quote management: the solution

A particular bottleneck Dennemeyer struggled with was their quote management which was slowing down their sales team. Before automation, price approval process was completely email-based and quotes were sent out manually. Sales reps around the world were creating quotations that all looked different, with key parameters sometimes missing, stored hidden in email inboxes. As a result, it was difficult to track and analyze the quotations, especially those that were not accepted by customers. As Koen Rijken, Head of Sales Operations & Analytics at Dennemeyer, says:

“Often, we think of winning business, but to improve you must look at what you are not winning”

6. Quote management: the requirements

The solution they came up with involves an end-to-end process, starting with a salesperson entering an opportunity and ending with a signed deal with a customer. With clearly predefined approval processes in place, the latest document version is the only available in circulation, with all up-to-date information correctly linked to the Salesforce opportunity object. The whole process works in closed loops so that nothing can get out without an approval.

7. Quote management: solving pricing issues

An issue Dennemeyer quickly ran into were custom pricing schemes. They could not accommodate to the complex service portfolio requiring more parameters due to the limitation of standard Salesforce quote templates. For example, multiple pricing tables were demanded by Dennemeyer’s customers who are now able to view the breakdown of the total price involving both annual recurring fees (1a) and one-time fees (1b) in a single quotation. When it comes to Commercial Terms (2), Dennemeyer needed dynamic fields that can be added or removed as selected with the value inside changing based on Salesforce data. Finally, different Terms and Conditions (3a) are required with different products in the pricing table (3b) which are automatically attached.

8. Documill’s solution

This is where Documill stepped in with a custom dynamic template which can process document logic based on data and attach different types of attachments to the document. Quotes are now generated conditionally and allow teams outside sales to participate on the document assembly. Document output is standardized with unified branding which ensures that every customer receives a quote with the same look and feel. As Dennemeyer operates in multiple countries, localization requirements were met by generating the quotes in different languages, including different time and date formats, currency, and number formatting. Everything that is sent out is tracked in Salesforce records which collects useful information for further development of Dennemeyer’s services. Finally, the whole process was easy to implement by simply downloading the solution from Salesforce AppExchange into Sandbox for testing.

9. The perfect agreement process enables sales to sell more

Where Salesforce comes short, Documill extends its capabilities with flexibility and adaptability needed to work with documents efficiently, maximizing Salesforce investment as a result.

What our customer & partner say

“Before automating quote management at Dennemeyer, the price approval process was completely email-based and customized quotes were sent out manually. Documill’s automation helped us standardize this process to eliminate errors and speed up quote creation.” – Koen Rijken, Head of Sales Operations & Analytics at Dennemeyer

“Standard Salesforce quote templates are not sufficient when complex document templates require more parameters. We chose Documill to standardize quote creation for our client Dennemeyer because it was fast and easy to implement.” – Annukka Karppinen, Salesforce Consultant at Fluido