St. Louis consistently ranks in the top three charitable cities in the U.S., according to charity evaluator Charity Navigator. However, with a decrease in corporate headquarters, it was important for the United Way of Greater St. Louis to find new ways maximize opportunities with its donor base to continue its tradition of improving communities and lives.

An idea hit Orvin Kimbrough, President and CEO of United Way of Greater St. Louis – the fifth largest United Way chapter in the world. What if the organization could help manage top donors’ overall philanthropy efforts, creating a simple turnkey approach to giving, regardless of whether or not the donor is giving to a United Way agency? The United Way already vets non-profit agencies and channels money to selected organizations.

A strategy was born – and built into the organization’s five-year strategic plan. The next step? Finding a partner with both the technical and user interface experience to bring the strategy to life.

A major goal of the effort was to automate tasks that were previously done manually. Xceede Solutions leveraged the robust power of Salesforce® as the core platform for the new technology, called the Donor Service System. While the solution tapped into Salesforce capabilities end to end, a core element is Conga Composer, which was implemented for document generation and reporting.

Xceede helped United Way realize the full capabilities of the Salesforce platform, and made recommendations on various ways to tackle the pain points by explaining differences in cost, time, and product flexibility. In short, we operationalized the CEO and CTO's vision.

Departments

• Donor Services

Users

• 5 Donor Management Services

Solutions

Salesforce® solutions

• Sales Cloud
• Communities
• Nonprofit Success Pack

AppExchange apps

• Conga Composer

Data integration

Integration platform

• Guidestar API

Enterprise systems

• Oracle Netsuite
• Sales distributor data

United Biosource Corporation (UBC), a leading provider of pharmaceutical support services, had recently been acquired by a private equity firm, ending the company’s relationship with its parent company, Express Scripts. UBC was no longer able to leverage shared services from Express Scripts, so UBC needed to develop its own contract management solution.

In addition, management wanted to increase lead generation results as well as streamline and optimize their sales process by using a Salesforce® CRM.

UBC partnered with Xceede Solutions to create a standalone contracting workflow and document repository, data management and sales prospecting tools, and to replace UBC’s sales/proposals workflow and forecast tool and convert that data into a scalable Salesforce®-based CRM.

Xceede Solutions helped UBC come up with an implementation roadmap, so they could have a modular approach to the development of their platform and could begin reaping business benefits from their investment sooner than later.

Departments

• Sales
• Legal

Users

• 20 across departments

Solutions

Salesforce® solutions

• Sales Cloud

AppExchange apps

• D&B Optimizer

Data integration

Enterprise systems

• BioMed Tracker
• Microsoft Sharepoint
• Spring CM

Opportunity management

The main goal of the project entailed streamlining United BioSource’s opportunity management process. Xceede Solutions worked with management to formalize the process and implemented Salesforce® Sales Cloud to support the process.

Every other project highlight supports and strengthens Opportunity Management.

Sales intelligence

In order to optimize the lead generation process, Xceede Solutions integrated the new Salesforce® CRM with BioMed Tracker, an industry-specific data provider. With this new data integration process in place, the Sales team was able to prospect potential clients and opportunities from within their CRM.

Proposal management

United BioSource was using a homegrown solution based on Sharepoint and Smart Web. We migrated the solution to Salesforce® in order to provide the proposal management team a seamless and unified experience, while eliminating room for errors resulting in data duplication, inconsistencies and gaps.

As part of the solution, we ensured the proposal management solution was embedded at the appropriate level of the opportunity management workflow. We also ensured that the sales process includes appropriate stages for proposal management.

Contract management

Xceede Solutions assisted UBC and SpringCM in implementing a Contract Management solution on Salesforce. We worked closely with the legal department to create business processes around the various contract types as part of their Sales process.

We worked closely with SpringCM to customize Sales Cloud for better integration with their Solution.

We also assisted in training 15 users.

Analytics for experience-based selling

As a Contract Research Organization, UBC responds to many RFIs. Xceede Solutions developed a data model in Salesforce, leveraging Tableau CRM analytics, that allowed the Sales team to rapidly mine previous contract data. This enabled them to rapidly check in Salesforce for the company’s previous experience, giving them the information needed to answer RFIs with proposals that offered concrete experience. This increased their probability of winning deals.

With the growing popularity of comics and animation in pop culture, organizations of all sizes are adopting story telling techniques as part of their branding and marketing initiatives. Polarity has been at the forefront on this movement and is one of the few media publishers that also offer creative services to organizations. Given the nature of the business, building and maintaining great client relationships are critical to its continued growth.

Polarity needed a CRM that provides end-to-end management of its Sales, Editorial, Legal and Finance functions.

Departments

• Sales
• Marketing
• Project delivery
• Legal

Users

• 20 across departments

Solutions

Salesforce® solutions

• Sales Cloud

AppExchange apps

• Conga Composer
• Conga Contracts
• PLNR — Sales-Driven Planning®

Custom solutions

• Proposal management
• Royalty management

Data integration

Integration platform

• TIBCO Scribe

Enterprise systems

• Oracle Netsuite
• Sales distributor data

Proposal management

Proposals play a crucial role in the sales process for Polarity. They conduct discovery meetings with their prospective clients in order to better understand the needs and carefully craft set of solutions along with pricing in the form of a proposal. Xceede Solutions implemented a light-weight Proposal Management tool native to Salesforce along with Conga Composer in order to automate proposal generation. Once the client accepts the proposal, the contracts team can then generate the corresponding agreements using Conga Contracts and manage the entire lifecycle from within Salesforce.

Xceede Solutions was able to reduce the amount of time spent in manual tasks to get the right information into document tables for both proposals and contracts.

Relationship management

There are around 400 significant comic book stores in the United States. Among these are trend-setting stores and market leaders. Publishers generally sell their products through distributors. However, the growth and success of a product line has a direct correlation with having a strong relationship with these differentiated stores. It is important for the publisher to enhance its relationship with these stores.

We configured Salesforce not only to track the level of Polarity’s engagement with these key customers, but also to deepen its relationship. We set up a cadence around engagement with these key customers and put in place systems to track and report activities to ensure a minimum level of touch points happened on a weekly basis.

Contract management

Polarity had a large number of contractors and licensors that participated in the comic book publishing process. As a result, the company had over 4,000 contracts and needed a solution to manage and streamline the workflow in order to scale without having to increase head count.

Xceede Solutions implemented Conga Contracts for Salesforce to streamline the entire Contract Lifecycle Management for 10 different contract types. The entire Contracts process is managed in Salesforce along with the key business information around Account relationships, Intellectual Properties and related Products, Licensors, and Creators.

We configured all royalty structures and payment schedules within the system in order to automate their royalty management.

Some publication deadline are time-sensitive, so they needed to make sure that they could set up freelancers in their system in a timely manner. If the legal processes took too long, the company would have a hard time meeting deadlines. By making sure contracts are written using pre-approved language, taking advantage of a clause library, Polarity could speed up contract creation while significantly reducing its risk.

We also set up their system for larger companies who license intellectual property from Polarity. The solution allowed their team to align the terms of payments that would be due.

Through a contract management solution implemented within the CRM, Polarity’s team would be able to track financial performance against the contracts.

We also set up cases in Salesforce so editors could request new contracts to be drawn up. The legal team now receives request tickets with the requirements to draw up a contract any time one is needed.

Sales & Revenue Planning

Xceede implemented PLNR — Sales-Driven Planning® to collapse the planning cycle into the sales cycle itself. Now Operations, Editorial, Legal, and Finance all plan from the same pipeline, each with their own lens.

When Sales builds a proposal, Editorial sees resource demand rolling up from opportunities in real-time. Legal gets visibility into contract volume before deadlines arrive. Finance forecasts royalty obligations based on pipeline and closed deals.

The feedback loop runs both ways. When Editorial flags a capacity constraint, Sales is aware of it and factors it in setting customer expectations. When an opportunity slips, everyone's plan adjusts automatically, with no spreadsheet updates required.

The results: fewer over-commitments to clients, better cash flow visibility on royalty obligations, and the ability to scale creative operations without adding headcount. Polarity's 20-hour monthly time savings from royalty automation was just the start: PLNR eliminated the hidden cost of misalignment between what Sales sells and what the rest of the business can actually deliver.

Sales reporting

Polarity received sales information from 20 different distributors ever month. We fully automated sales reporting for the Sales team, directing all the sales data into Salesforce. This enabled them to  analyze their results from every angle.

We then combined the Sales reporting data we had brought into Salesforce with the Contract Management solution to create a Royalty Management solution.

Royalty management

As revenue comes in from publication sales, Polarity owes royalty payments to different creators and licensors. Royalty agreements can be complex, based on different factors and vary from creator to creator. Xceede Solutions set up the different factors into the Contract Management solution.

Royalties are paid based on sales that were made. The sales reporting engine already brought in all the sales data needed to calculate royalties.

By leveraging the royalty information contained in the contract management solution and the sales data, we were able to automate royalty management for Polarity. The royalty management engine automatically determines what royalties were due and automatically sends out royalty reporting to hundreds of freelancers every month.

Also, all the information is readily available to answer audits. If a large company audits Polarity, they have everything available and the royalty reporting is all automated.

Integrations

Xceede Solutions implemented an integration between Salesforce and Oracle Netsuite in order to pull in expense data to be used in royalty management and reporting.

We also set up an integration with all the distributors to be able to get the sales numbers at a SKU level. This enabled:

1. the sales team to analyze the business at a granular detail level
2. the automation of royalty reporting, as royalty payments are tied to sales of individual SKUs.

Since its founding, non-profit venture capital investor BioSTL and its investment arm, BioGenerator, worked with a homegrown program management product. The software helped the organization manage investments, grants, business formation, communications, events, and diversity and inclusion initiatives. Everything was custom coded and hosted on premise. A full-time staff member built and maintained the system’s functionality.

As the organization grew, it became increasingly difficult and inefficient to navigate the data, share information and create reports. Program management elements were not working well together, creating inefficiencies and frustration. It became clear that BioSTL needed a better solution.

Using the robust power of Salesforce®, Xceede Solutions leveraged Sales Cloud to develop an organization-wide program management platform, creating a single place for managing all relationships and details. Sales Cloud enabled BioGenerator to:

• More efficiently track investments utilizing the pipeline and activity management functionality.
• Boost productivity and improve relationship management with Lightning for Outlook, enabling users to create contacts, accounts, and sync email content and attachments directly into Salesforce.
• Easily measure impact by gathering important constituent metrics using the survey tool GetFeedback.
• Utilize Salesforce as the main information repository by implementing EventBrite and MailChimp Apps.

Staff training and ongoing support have been an essential part of the successful implementation of Salesforce. Xceede onboarded and trained 20 Salesforce users, and provides ongoing support to help ensure that the 27-member BioGenerator team reaps the benefits of all Salesforce has to offer.

Departments

• BioGenerator, Fundamentals
• Grants 2 Business
• Diversity & Inclusion
• Public Relations
• STEMSTL

Users

• 20 across departments

Solutions

Salesforce® solutions

• Sales Cloud

Data integration

Enterprise systems

• GetFeedback
• MailChimp
• EventBrite
• DocuSign
• Box