Hockey stick growth in partner engagement with a lead-to-order platform

For Framery, profound collaboration with different partners and stakeholders has always been a critical success factor in reaching its meteoric growth. Framery wanted to develop processes and tools in information sharing, collaboration, sales and after-sales further with their partners.

Thus, Framery joined forces with Columbia Road to build Framery 360, a channel for an end-to-end buying experience. Framery had great expectations for the new platform, including:

• One-stop-shop for partners, designers and architects
• Digital tools for all key use cases along the buyer journey
• Even deeper collaboration between Framery sales and partner sales
• Faster quote-to-order lead time with transparency into delivery times, shipping costs, order statuses and availability
• Transparent visibility to the whole partner sales pipeline

Our approach

Framery already had a grand vision of how they wanted to take their partner collaboration to the next level. Columbia Road’s cross-functional team of service designers, business architects, developers and marketers helped Framery to fine-tune their vision by forming a better understanding of Framery’s buyer motivations, buyer experience target state, the priority of customer use cases and technical solution options and their fit to the requirements at hand.

We started by designing the UX and visual design to reflect the Framery brand better and to match the award-winning level of customer design standards. With this, it was easy to build a complete and shared understanding within the team of the minimum viable product of core features that would provide the most value for Framery, partners and end customers.

We then moved visual sales configurators, quoting and ordering onto the Salesforce Community cloud. To ensure technical viability, we took a proof-of-concept approach to ensure we chose the right solution for the most complex features, such as visual configuration. To allow full ownership of the whole solution, the complex product data and product visualisation were moved to the Salesforce platform to enable higher business agility. With this, Framery could see the full end-to-end view of the whole buyer journey:

• Lead sharing to partners from leads generated by Framery
• The complex visual sales configuration can be managed by Framery by clicks, not code, by disconnecting the sales configuration from the custom-built configurator and ERP
• Role-based personalisation and access for different partner roles: from serving the end customers to having the right amount of data and features at hand
• Materials and processes to serve key steps in the after-sales process

Impact

Framery 360 truly combines all necessary tools for Framery’s global network of partners, architects and designers, installers and end customers, who either work with Framery or use Framery pods. Framery 360 is a single channel that combines all needed information, materials and tools when working with Framery.

The launch of the service has had a true hockey stick effect on partner engagement, information sharing and, not of least importance, digital sales growth. Check here what the Framery 360 platform looks like.

Highlights from the project

• 20% increase in new partners onboarded to Framery digital services during the first month
• Launch of a new product concept, Framery One, through Framery 360
• 100 self-service quotes a week done by employees or partners
• Each quote done in Framery 360 saves time for both Framery’s sales team and partner staff, compared to manual calculations
• Quotes done in Framery 360 also increase transparency and data, which can be utilised in demand forecasting
• 2000 material bank item views a month accounts for a reduction of approximately 500 emails – Partners find the needed materials easier and faster from the material bank