Stora Enso: Increasing sales efficiency with actionable data

Stora Enso is one of the largest private forest owners in the world, focused on sustainability and responsible land management. Headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, they are the leading provider of renewable products in packaging, biomaterials and wooden construction.

Striving towards a carbon-neutral future, satisfying their customer’s needs, and utilising the most up-to-date renewable solutions, Stora Enso is constantly looking towards improving their processes, saving energy and operating in the most efficient way possible.

To enhance their sales capabilities, Stora Enso wanted to develop their customer data platform and provide up-to-date analytics for their many sales users. They turned to Fluido, known for their passion and expertise in data and Salesforce.

Actionable data

Stora Enso aimed to improve sales process efficiency and help them use their time more effectively. They wanted to provide sales managers and leaders a 360-degree view of all their data, processes and performance. This meant combining their inventory, profitability and forecasting data from a primary external database, Snowflake, with Salesforce’s accounts, opportunities and agreement-related data.

“Before we started the development, I knew our plans were ambitious. Getting the dashboard to meet sales’ expectations to be informative, guiding actions, flexible, well structured and user-friendly would need multiple iterations, and it sure did. Still, it was a lot easier with a great partner like Fluido,” says Mika Ahonen, Sales Support Manager at Stora Enso.

Stora Enso wanted a unified, easy-to-use UI so sales would immediately understand their performance. Also, each business unit would only see the data vital to them.

Stora Enso aimed to provide sales with a dashboard that offers actionability and guides them to make optimal decisions. With Salesforce CRM Analytics, it’s all contained in a single point of access, the user’s home page of Salesforce. Unifying both systems will allow users to set up notifications and alerts in real-time, for example, if their sales reach a set threshold or credit limits are exceeded.

“Our earlier knowledge about the CRM Analytics was limited. However, we knew it provided excellent possibilities for building comprehensive analytics solutions. Our requirements were not always the easiest to fulfil, so it was delightful that the partner had the right attitude to look for solutions”, Mika describes the cooperation.

Connecting the dots

Salesforce’s CRM Analytics would allow Stora Enso to analyse their customer data due to the built-in connectors to Salesforce objects. Using its built-in external data connectors and API, they could combine their Salesforce data with data in their Snowflake database, giving a 360-degree view of their customer.

“With a vision and years of end-user feedback, we developed the dashboards in two-week sprints. We brought new parts, removed others and kept refining and shaping it towards the needed shape and experience. In all development, we highlighted similar structure, automation and end-user guidance,” Mika says.

Setting up the Snowflake connector was straightforward; it utilises the built-in connector of CRM Analytics to connect to a Snowflake database. Users can choose the appropriate tables and fields to import the required Snowflake data into CRM Analytics.

Datasets were built for each of Stora Enso’s processes, with security predicates built on top of them to limit access to sensitive data. Finally, the last step was to use this data, with the Salesforce-based datasets, to create a dashboard to provide insights for Stora Enso’s sales managers and leaders.

Empowered data for process improvements

Fluido provided Stora Enso a platform for managing customer data and providing up-to-date analytics for their many sales users. Using their new dashboards, which are tailored to each user’s unique role within Stora Enso, they can visualise the many facets of their business, utilise dynamic notifications and ultimately take advantage of data-driven actionability.

“Presenting the dashboards and their analytics to users was like giving a group of children a box of Legos or their favourite board game, but better than ever. They LOVED the dashboards, in capital letters,” Russell Towsey, VP Head of Sales Network at Stora Enso, says.

The Sales 360 Dashboard provides users access to both Salesforce and Snowflake data, allowing them to take action, receive dynamic notifications on changes in the data, and save multiple views to swap between different reporting requirements quickly.

“This is now the core of Salesforce for sales. Everything starts from there, and everything leads there,” Mika says.

Sales 360 Dashboard

The My Accounts Dashboard is the easiest way for a user to view their accounts and create new opportunities, setting up customer meetings and tasks – all directly from the dashboard, saving the user time and clicks.

My Accounts Dashboard

The users now have access to their data from different systems in a single location to provide them with a single dashboard tailored to their needs, with the dashboard providing many unique default views depending on the type of user viewing it.

“How cool, clean and easy the role-based pages are for sales. I was astounded at their eagerness to play with this new tool, drill down in the filters and sliders and get lost in data. It was a joy to watch,” Russell says and concludes:

“We created something wonderful, and now my job is to ensure the organisation understands its power. Also, its ability to save time, cut down on powerpoints and focus on using the tool for all internal customer discussions.”

Written by Mirka Kurkela & Thomas Stephen