Larsen & Toubro's Cloudfiniti division embraces Bigin over spreadsheets to streamline their sales operations.

The company

Larsen & Toubro (L&T) is a prominent Indian multinational company founded in 1938. Over the years, L&T has evolved into a conglomerate with interests spanning construction, engineering, technology, manufacturing, and financial services.

Recognizing the potential of digital clouds to revolutionize Indian businesses, L&T established Cloudfiniti with the mission to provide secure, scalable, and reliable data center and cloud solutions. L&T-Cloudfiniti started its journey by providing colocation services from its secure, state-of-the-art Navi Mumbai and Chennai data centers, which provide a range of public, private, and hybrid cloud solutions powered by leading players like Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform.

The challenge

The company faced challenges in tracking their daily activities using Excel spreadsheets—especially for their stringent sales operations. The Inside Sales team focused on lead generation through various channels such as LinkedIn, outbound calls, and referrals, and after carefully nurturing these leads, they passed them on to the Direct Sales team. Though both teams operated via distinct lead qualification processes, both processes involved setting up numerous tasks related to meetings, negotiations, legal considerations, documentation, and more. Very little information flowed between each team, which led to a dire need for a more direct and collaborative process.

In an attempt to optimize the sales process, L&T-Cloudfiniti's senior management conducted weekly reviews that involved both the Inside Sales and Direct Sales teams. However, scheduling and maintaining these crucial meetings demanded a lot of manual effort through emails or direct announcements.

Realizing how self-limiting it was to rely on spreadsheets, one of L&T-Cloudfiniti's sales managers—Renu—proposed the implementation of a CRM.

The solution

After evaluating Salesforce, Bitrix 24, Oracle, and other CRM solutions in the market, Renu found that none of them aligned perfectly with L&T-Cloudfiniti's specific business needs. However, during their trial period with Bigin, the team discovered a user-friendly, feature-rich, and highly customizable platform. One major advantage was Bigin's ability to integrate with other tools in Zoho's ecosystem. Impressed by all of these offerings—and the tool's affordable cost—L&T-Cloudfiniti chose Bigin as their preferred CRM solution.

Bigin features L&T-Cloudfiniti used to streamline their sales process:

• Team pipelines-The Inside Sales, Inside Lead Nurturing, and Direct Sales teams all have individual pipelines that help them manage inbound and outbound leads.
• Stage transition rules-The teams at L&T-Cloudfiniti manage the process of moving leads from one stage to another using stage transition rules. For example, the team has set up conditions that a lead can't be moved to the next stage unless certain necessary details are gathered—budget, delivery date, customer address, etc.
• Custom filters-Custom filters have enabled L&T-Cloudfiniti's sales teams to set up customized views of their data according to specific criteria, which in turn drives more efficient decision-making.
• Connected records-The Lead Nurturing team is able to transfer leads to the Inside Sales and Direct Sales teams while maintaining data privacy. Connected record automation plays a vital role in making the sales process seamless by automatically creating new records in different pipelines.
• Workflows-Upon lead assignment, a system-generated notification is sent to the owners, encouraging them to actively engage with prospects and convert to deals quicker.
• Activities module-The team uses the Activities module to schedule customer meetings, track their tasks and events, and stay on top of their follow-up game.
• Dashboards-L&T-Cloudfiniti's senior management team uses dashboards to track the sales teams' progress, analyze the revenue generated, and monitor the number of calls each individual agent has made.

Benefits and ROI

• Bigin has helped the sales teams streamline their sales process and improve their overall efficiency.
• Communication between internal teams and customers has become more effective.
• Bigin has helped eliminate manual and repetitive work, enabling sales agents to focus on more important tasks.
• With lead and deal information more readily available, the team can now make more informed decisions.

Looking forward

L&T-Cloudfiniti is planning on expanding even further. Their vision involves bringing other teams, like marketing and finance, into the Zoho ecosystem to foster a more unified and integrated approach to their business processes.