The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is the professional body for experts in HR and people at work. For over 100 years, CIPD has been championing better work and working lives by setting professional standards and driving positive change in the world of work. The organisation also provides a wide range of training and development services.

CIPD’s independent research, insights, and high standards allows the organisation to serve as a trusted adviser to governments and employers across the world. With hubs in the UK, Ireland, Middle East and Asia, CIPD is the career partner of choice for almost 160,000 members worldwide and is the only body in the world that can award Chartered status to individual HR and L&D professionals. CIPD provides a wide range training and development services.

Before CIPD began working with Bluewave, the organisation’s users were quite restricted in terms of what data they could add into the system and were using manual work-arounds to record information. For example, users found it difficult to record any variables and customisations to products that were sold, and were often relying on detailing these changes in free text fields. Additionally, users could add only one product per opportunity, meaning that each product sold had to be recorded separately, rather than everything being classed under one opportunity, which took up valuable time and slowed the rate of data input completion.

Other internal issues that CIPD was having included the fact that the Service Brief communication shared between the organisation’s Sales and Delivery teams was disordered and difficult to use. On top of that, opportunities, orders, and invoices needed to be updated manually at every stage of the sales cycle – including after closing an opportunity. All in all, there were many ways in which CIPD’s existing system needed improving in order to improve user experience and increase work efficiency.

In order to rectify these inefficiencies, streamline processes, and foster better communication between CIPD’s Sales and Delivery teams – a custom-built Salesforce solution was designed. CIPD had a previous Salesforce configuration, but it needed to be updated to meet the global organisation’s growing needs. CIPD trusted Bluewave with this project due to the knowledge of our consultants, our reputation for success with Salesforce technology, and our agile delivery methodology.

The overall scope of the project was to improve the sales process that CIPD’s B2B teams had. Our experts used a combination of Salesforce products and custom-built tools in order to deliver success for CIPD. This included: Salesforce CPQ, Sales Cloud, Flows, Lightning web components, dynamic lightning pages, validation rules, price rules, and more.

Salesforce Configure, Price, Quote is a Salesforce managed package used for complex sales processes. For example, if a customer has a complicated pricing setup with subscription models, contract amendments, multiple products, etc. Salesforce CPQ is an ideal solution to deploy. CPQ works together with Sales Cloud, working to handle the additional layer of complexity that CIPD’s payments process required.

“The best way to see is that CPQ kind of sits on top of the normal Sales Cloud sales process. So, when you build Salesforce CPQ and then deploy it, you’ll almost always have some configuration that’s specific to CPQ and those objects, as well as some config that’s specific to Sales Cloud. These two solutions work hand-in-hand, with Sales Cloud being configured to handle standard contracts, accounts, and opportunities, but then CPQ bolts on to those to add additional fields and necessary functionality. As we were crafting the solution, we were using both tools at the same time.” – Salesforce Functional Consultant at Bluewave

While most of the time, Bluewave are contacted by customers to replace legacy systems with a modern solution built with Salesforce technology, what makes this project stand out is that CIPD realised that the existing Salesforce solution they were using needed to be updated and improved. As part of this process, CPQ attributes, features, and product options were configured to massively improve user experience. This configuration would allow users to build fully customisable products using product-specific variables – all within a simple, dynamic user interface. Previous custom Salesforce features present in CIPDs system were depreciated and replaced with CPQ’s product-level configuration, as it was much better suited to CIPD’s needs.

“The original work we were brought in to do for CIPD was an Org Review, as the organisation knew improvements needed to be made, but needed a team to investigate what exactly those improvements would be. We reviewed the org and then proposed a body of work. Off the back of that, we began work on a number of necessary phases, including a lead process change, a Marketing Cloud project, and this Sales Improvement process. 

CPQ is something that we recommended, when we realised how complex their sales process was. I had a conversation with them about Salesforce CPQ, what it does, and why they needed it. CIPD trusted my expertise and following a few demos and scoping, we moved forward with the deployment.” – Salesforce Consultant at Bluewave

As part of this ongoing collaborative project, Bluewave’s experts continue to provide ongoing support with CIPD’s marketing plan. This includes support with CIPD’s existing Marketing Cloud implementation, which has been further optimised to suit the organisation’s changing needs, as well as various other marketing-related projects.

Additionally, the service brief feature was depreciated and replaced with email notifications, sent via a number of Salesforce Flows which would be automatically triggered when an order is created, amended, or deleted. Although the B2B Sales Process Improvement project is the main focus of this case study, it’s relevant to note that part of this project work was configured to feed into future project work as well. For that reason, during this implementation, a custom amendment process was built in at this stage, to better compliment the Netsuite integration that would be coming in a future phase of work.

“We knew from the beginning of the project that we’d be working alongside CIPD’s developers and wanted to ensure that the work we did wouldn’t hinder or get in the way of their own project work. To combat this, we suggested a DevOps process to allow us to work in parallel, carrying out work at the same time as them, but on different systems that couldn’t affect each other. They trusted us to carry out our work and we did the same. As a result, I can confidently say that we worked very well with CIPD’s teams as a whole.” – Salesforce Functional Consultant at Bluewave

With every engagement, Bluewave strives to build a collaborative relationship between our technical staff, project managers, and our valued customers. Our proven implementation process – The Bluewave Way™ – has led to the delivery of over 250 successful Salesforce projects and engagements over the last decade. We’ve designed this process to be flexible, adapting to each customer’s individual and changing needs.

Our expert consultants established open communication with CIPDs technical teams, with our project managers also working to communicate complications and issues directly to key stakeholders. It was because of this communication and trust that the team was able to bounce back from unexpected challenges. One example of this was that the project’s go-live date ended up coinciding with the latest Salesforce release. This meant that the managed package our team wanted to deploy needed to be tweaked further to align with Salesforce best practice, which slowed down our go-live date by two weeks, while the product was updated. Our consultants explained the importance of this delay to CIPD, who understood the situation and prioritised a secure and efficient system over a hard deployment date. Following this, our experts then worked quickly to ensure the new deployment date was successfully met.

“This was an excellent project to work on from start to finish. By utilising The Bluewave Way and maintaining our standard for delivery excellence, we were able to facilitate great communication and transparency from both the Bluewave and CIPD project teams. This led to a very successful project and a satisfied client, which is what we love to see.” – Salesforce Functional Consultant at Bluewave

Following Bluewave’s overhaul of CIPD’s sales process, the organisation’s users can now meet their customers’ requirements accurately, with product-specific parameters. Additionally, as each product’s variables are now predefined, configuration is regulated and clearly outlined. Users can now sell any mixture of products together as one opportunity, no longer needing to manually create multiple versions of the same opportunity to represent a single sale. Users no longer need to rely on free-text fields and off-platform emails to communicate what products have been sold.

On top of this, CIPD’s delivery teams now receive of the delivery-related information they need from order and order-product records. The whole process is kept on-platform and is presented in an easily accessible, purpose-built user interface. Now that Bluewave has implemented multiple custom-built and Salesforce-powered tools, users within CIPD can now amend opportunities, quotes, orders, and invoices after an opportunity is closed. Following an amendment, the process retains previous archived records and allows full transparency on every amendment. 

Achieving this goal could not have been possible without the communication and co-operation our consultants shared with CIPD.

“This was one of the most peaceful projects I’ve ever been involved in, so it’s safe to say. I really enjoyed this project, especially considering that the majority of the deployment was very smooth. CIPD’s team had the technical skills to understand what we were doing, but enough trust in our knowledge to allow us to get on with the implementation, confident that the end result would suit them well. They respected us, gave us the information that we needed, and were really friendly, helpful, and communicative. We aligned very well, which definitely contributed to the success of the project.” – Salesforce Consultant at Bluewave

Bluewave’s experts crafted a product that allows CIPD’s B2B sales users full use of a CRM that caters for any of the complexities involved in selling to their customers. The changes made have also allowed for a much more unified process; when a sale is closed and passed from CIPD’s Sales department to Delivery team to Fulfilment, it is now handled with purpose-built processes that save time and give a clearer, more holistic view of each customer engagement. 

Crafting this solution was a challenging but rewarding experience for our experts, and the whole Bluewave team is pleased with the success of this digital transformation.

“It was a really good project, internally the team was great – there was great communication between us and CIPD. In terms of what we’ve designed and delivered, that experience was quite enjoyable as well. It was a challenging deployment, there were a lot of complex problems to solve and we got to use a number of different functions. This made it a really interesting and fulfilling technical project, that required a bit of upskilling, but I’m really proud of what we delivered. Their business requirement was quite unique, and it was a great opportunity to collaborate.” – Salesforce Functional Consultant at Bluewave

Since the recent successful launch of CIPD’s custom-built Salesforce solution, we continue to work alongside the organisation in a supporting capacity. Bluewave’s consultants did several “train the trainer” sessions delivered to CIPD’s team managers, who would then go on to teach their individual teams. Our experts also delivered some admin training to upskill CIPD’s main admins on Salesforce CPQ functionality, allowing them to maintain products and product setup with ease, over the course of six training sessions.

Additionally, three large-scale integration projects are in-progress, as our experts further refine and build upon CIPDs existing environment, with the overarching goal of modernising and improving the organisation’s systems, to the highest standard possible.