Miura Empowers Its Distributors with a Revamped Partner Community

Business Challenge

Doug MacMaster is Senior Vice President of Miura’s U.S. operations; his team manages the company’s sales and maintenance activities across America and the Caribbean. That means they are tasked with overseeing direct sales engineers in 10 different offices as well as an extensive network of distributors responsible for the bulk of the organization’s sales.

When he first joined Miura, however, the company was using an Excel-based CRM tool — which was developed in-house. Recognizing that there might be newer tools for tracking key sales data, MacMaster suggested the need for an updated solution: “I said, ‘Can we talk about something like Salesforce?’” Eventually, he and a few colleagues were able to make a strong case for the industry-leading CRM.

To get started, Miura’s U.S. team hired an implementation firm to build a custom partner portal using Salesforce’s Community Cloud platform. The goal? To create a tool that enabled better lead management. Unfortunately, though, the end product didn’t hit the mark.

Solution

Unhappy with this initial build, Miura brought in Torrent Consulting to make some improvements. Together, the two companies collaborated on an optimization that empowered Miura’s users — both internal and external — with the features they really needed. Now, it’s easy for members of the Miura team to route leads to their distributors. And for those distributors — who don’t work in exclusive territories — it’s possible to submit registration requests for their own sourced leads.

“The first company [that we worked with] turned out to be a disaster,” MacMaster said. “Basically, whatever harebrained idea we came up with, they said, ‘Okay, we’ll build it for you.’ What we found out later is that we needed somebody to stand up and say, ‘That doesn’t make sense, and here’s a better way to do it. Here are best practices.’”