Cisco Meraki captures $5 billion in sales through 92% lead routing accuracy

Challenge

Equipping the sales team with accurate and timely leads

Cisco Systems is a leader in IT and networking solutions, specializing in switches, routers, cybersecurity, and IoT (Internet of things) technologies. The company seizes every opportunity it can to connect systems and devices. So when it acquired Meraki in 2012, which specializes in cloud-managed network solutions, Cisco anticipated an increase in its market reach with the expanded offerings.

With the acquisition, the Cisco Meraki (formerly Meraki) sales team faced new challenges in managing the huge increase in leads coming from Cisco. As the team worked to streamline their lead management process with the parent company, sales reps had to manually copy data from emails and paste them into Salesforce Sales Cloud as new opportunities, which was an error-prone and time-consuming effort. Additionally, its lead management solution consisted of six different legacy systems that were dispersed across on-premises and cloud-based environments that frequently created errors. It failed to assign leads coming from Cisco, the parent company, to the appropriate Cisco Meraki sales reps, resulting in lost opportunities. This sent the IT and sales teams scrambling to diagnose errors and assign them to the appropriate sales reps manually, taking them away from their core responsibilities and higher value projects.

Objectives

Capturing new sales and improving top line after acquisition

Cisco Meraki needed to update and redesign its lead management solution, referred to as the “deal review queue,” in order to capture new sales opportunities following the acquisition. The company needed to eliminate the lag time between the lead generation and opportunity development stages of the sales cycle by:

• Improving lead routing accuracy.
• Shortening the time it takes to diagnose and resolve lead routing issues.
• Establishing a single source of truth for sales data.

Solution

Integrating and automating sales lead management

The Cisco Meraki team implemented an end-to-end integration strategy using MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, Salesforce Platform, Sales Cloud, Tableau, and Slack which are part of the Salesforce Customer 360. They replaced legacy systems with Customer 360, simplifying and streamlining the tech stack from six disparate systems to two for its deal management solution.

At the heart of its API integration strategy sits Anypoint CloudHub, the platform as a service (PaaS) component of Anypoint Platform which provides the globally distributed architecture that the company needs in order to scale as it grows and innovates. “The new deal review queue solution enables us to scale and manage any spikes in sales. Our integration architecture with MuleSoft positions us to handle and flex to anything that may come our way in the future,” says Mircea Solomon, Senior Salesforce Engineer, Cisco Meraki.

Anypoint Platform enabled the team to integrate its systems of record, intelligence, and engagement to improve operational efficiencies and create a single source of truth for its sales data in Salesforce. Using modern API integration and automation, they created a new routing logic to improve lead routing accuracy for its deal review queue solution. As a result, the Cisco Meraki sales reps no longer manually import lead information into Salesforce. Information automatically flows from the email system into its Salesforce instance via APIs, making it also available for Tableau to ingest the data and provide the IT team with actionable, data-driven insights.

Anypoint Platform also enabled the team to integrate Slack with Salesforce so that the sales and IT operations teams can act on leads in real time with near-instant alerts. When Anypoint Monitoring detects an error in the deal review queue, everyone on the team is automatically notified through Slack and can see exactly what the error is and where it occurred. The IT operations team can troubleshoot issues quickly while the sales team can reassign the affected leads to ensure that the customer and prospect experiences are seamless.

“We were told by one of our global channel leads that the best thing we do operationally at Cisco Meraki from a sales perspective is the new deal review queue.”

Bob Bach,
Technical Project Manager, Cisco Meraki.

Results

Boosting operational efficiencies and lead routing accuracy

With Customer 360, Cisco Meraki improved its operational efficiencies, captured new opportunities, and drove over $5 billion in sales. The company raised the accuracy rate for lead routing by 33% — from 59% to 92% — narrowing the lag time between lead generation and opportunity development. According to Bach, “from day one, the API-led integration using Anypoint Platform boosted our lead routing accuracy.” The right sales rep can now follow up on leads while they’re hot. Additionally, the teams no longer spend hours trying to pinpoint an error and route leads to the correct sales reps. This has increased the team’s productivity by saving more than 17 hours per quarter, resulting in 641 support hours year-over-year and a 37% reduction in deal routing support cases. The deal review queue no longer requires two dedicated IT teams to support the apps. Now with only one dedicated IT team, the company has reallocated the highly-skilled IT team to higher-value, strategic projects.

“Our team’s mission is to build simple and powerful technology platforms to enable business continuity, drive efficiency, and facilitate new business models. MuleSoft helps us achieve exactly that,”

Mircea Solomon,
Senior Salesforce Engineer, Cisco Meraki.