Sphere Group
"Our focus now is to stay at the forefront of our industry and grow our customer and partner communities. Salesforce connects the dots between the different parts of our business and provides a backbone for growth."
Paris Cockinos, CEO
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Established in 1954, Sphere Group is a third-generation family business with an increasingly wide-range of business lines. From its initial focus on two-way radios through to its more recent foray into drones, it has evolved to provide customers with the latest high-tech innovations. It's now branching out further and has plans for global growth.
Paris Cockinos, CEO, Sphere Group, said each generation had nurtured and added something new to the business his grandfather first started. "Our focus now is to stay at the forefront of our industry and grow our customer and partner communities. Salesforce connects the dots between the different parts of our business and provides a backbone for growth."
Blazing a trail towards consistency and growth
As a result of its expansion, there are now five different businesses sitting underneath the Sphere Group. Cockinos wanted to ensure a consistent experience across them all, particularly for customers engaging with more than one brand.
"In the past, each of our businesses had different processes and there was no standard experience for customers wanting to engage with us as a whole. We often didn't even know if a customer was interacting with more than one business," said Cockinos. "We wanted to turn this around and improve collaboration across our different businesses and different departments."
To begin with, the Group needed a better way to manage the customer lifecycle. A proof of concept solidified the decision to implement Salesforce and not just Sales Cloud as originally planned.
"As a small business we were cautious about overextending ourselves, but it was easy to see huge value in having a single platform to manage sales, service and marketing," said Cockinos. "Now, six months later, that's been evidenced by our best quarter ever and 25% growth."
Streamlining sales and service
Using Salesforce has helped the Sphere Group standardise its processes and provide a consistent customer experience across all touchpoints. Sales Cloud provides a single view of each customer and is used to manage the customer lifecycle. Integrated with Pardot, it helps the business nurture leads and personalise campaigns for customers.
"We've just started to use Pardot for more strategic targeting and it's really turned marketing on its head. We can segment campaigns based on business divisions or target industries and be much more effective in educating and engaging our customers," said Cockinos.
Service Cloud has helped close the loop when it comes to delivering a more consistent, streamlined customer experience. With improved workflows and easy visibility into all previous customer interactions, agents can manage cases more efficiently.
"Managing our business all on the one platform has delivered game changing efficiency. We can collaborate more easily and focus on innovation rather than manual process," said Cockinos.
Accelerating success
Salesforce is now the backbone of the Sphere Group's operations, helping the business work smarter and faster while placing the customer at the centre of everything that it does. It also provides Cockinos with new insights as he steers the business towards global growth. Decisions today are more are informed by data, giving Cockinos added confidence to grow the business in new directions.
"We want to do more with our data to better understand our customers and opportunities for growth. What I do know is that Salesforce will help us to scale whatever comes next," said Cockinos.