Fax Integration with Salesforce at Raven Industries

A NASDAQ-traded company recently named to Fortune’s Small Business 100 list, Raven Industries provides manufacturing services to several diverse markets. Raven Industries comprises four divisions: Electronic Systems, a total solution provider of contract manufacturing services for the computing and electronics industries; Flow Controls, which provides precision equipment to the agriculture market; Engineered Films, a leader in specialty polyethylene films for over 30 years; and Aerostar, a leading provider of inflatables for scientific research, military, marketing and general leisure purposes.

Challenge

Jesse Yost, one of Raven Industries’ network technicians, recalls what seemed like an insurmountable challenge for his team. “We thought we were going to have to custom-design a solution. It would have been a huge ordeal.”

Raven’s IT team faced this possibility when responding to a December 2004 call from company leadership for investment in a corporate-wide CRM solution. For the previous 12 years, Raven relied upon a combination of three software tools to assist its sales teams in managing information about customers and prospects, and in communicating with them via fax.

Seeking to streamline operations and reduce the IT resources required to support sales processes, the company decided to implement Salesforce, a leading CRM solution delivered on-demand, via a web browser. While Salesforce enabled Raven to better formalize sales processes and improved the way it used technology to manage customer information, end-users found Raven’s incumbent fax solution to be a bottleneck to the sales process. It was extremely cumbersome, requiring multiple steps and a separate email program to execute. Further, the incumbent fax solution entirely lacked broadcast faxing capabilities, something the IT team viewed as prohibitively difficult to achieve in-house through designing a custom application.

The challenge that remained was to leverage the full benefit of the Salesforce solution by finding a quicker, more efficient method to fax documents such as specification sheets, quotations and order confirmations to customers and prospects from the company’s Salesforce database.

Solution

Marlyn Waltner, National Sales Manager for Raven Industries, adds, “We spoke directly with Salesforce.com to get a recommendation on an offering that would solve our problem. They pointed us toward Esker, we started a conversation, and after taking one look at the product, we knew that Esker on Demand was a must-have.”

Raven’s IT team initially deployed Esker on Demand for Salesforce across its Engineered Films division’s sales team of 28 people who, as a team, routinely sent out over 800 faxes a month.