Name of partner: Salesforce
Project: Introducing the Salesforce IT software system to help manage and develop commercial opportunities at Newcastle Hospitals.
How we helped: The trust’s commercial enterprise team was established in June 2020 to develop opportunities to generate additional income to invest in patient care. There was a need to consolidate information about commercial projects, to support development and deployment across a large and complex organisation.
We defined criteria for a system that would:
- Hold and cross-reference all relevant information about individual commercial schemes into a single platform, allowing a comprehensive view of current and planned projects.
- Integrate reporting without the manual work of compiling data from multiple sources, allow a comprehensive view of forecasted revenue.
- Provide a consistent user experience which would harmonise internal processes and relationships with partners and customers.
Following a review of the market, the ‘customer-first’ strategy on Salesforce’s cloud-based customer relationship management solution was chosen, to manage a structured sales forecast pathway.
With this system, each commercial opportunity goes through six stages of review: initial inquiry, feasibility, development, proposal, negotiation and an active phase for live projects.
The flexibility of the Salesforce platform allows the commercial team to customise processes and fields within the system, providing accurate and up-to-date forecast information and status on each opportunity via integrated reports and dashboards.
Outcome: The Salesforce system was live within two months of procurement, with automated reports and dashboards now shared with stakeholders on a weekly and monthly basis.
Using the system, we can now:
- Track the number of open opportunities
- Track the number of leads expected to turn into opportunities
- Create, filter and configure reports
- Measure the ‘opportunity pipeline’ by scheme; the quantity in the pipeline as well as the total value
- Forecast the pipeline by stage.
The system is flexible enough to be tailored to any changes in the commercial team’s processes.
Salesforce has also now been rolled out to two further teams in Newcastle Hospitals and has been adapted to specifically meet each team’s requirements. Further adoption is planned across other parts of the organisation.
Our goal was to bring skills and expertise from industry into working with our hospital colleagues and to invest the income generated into healthcare delivery. It’s nice to feel, to see, to know that we’re making a difference to such a big organisation that’s helping so many people, especially during these times of unprecedented need.
Andrea Burroughs, former associate director of commercial enterprise at Newcastle Hospitals
