Small Business Week - Industrial Fire Products Corp Q&A

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, there are approximately 30.7 million small businesses in the United States. While our team works with companies of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 1000, we find it particularly gratifying to deliver solutions for small businesses. Small businesses are often challenged by budgets, time, and their team's bandwidth. That's why they benefit more from focusing their efforts on implementing applications and tools that streamline processes and automate manual and repetitive steps. Salesforce is often seen as a heavyweight CRM that is challenging to implement for small businesses, but with a trusted Salesforce partner they too can reap the benefits of a world-class CRM and business process automation platform.

In this week's Small Business Spotlight, we are excited to highlight Industrial Fire Products Corp. Our team worked with IPFC to implement Salesforce for their sales and accounting processes, and we're excited to share some of their insights about their business, their challenges, and their advice for implementing Salesforce!

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What does IFPC do

Founded in 1992, we are a corporation dedicated to serve our customers in all Firefighting, Rescue and Safety Equipment needs. We are equipped with the knowledge, the skills, the experience, and commitment to meet our customer’s requirements. IFPC is a distributor of public safety equipment and vehicles serving Puerto Rico and the Caribbean since 1992. We sell anything from PPE equipment to an emergency vehicle (ex. fire truck). If a first responder uses it, we sell it.

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What are some of your business or client goals?

Our customers main objective is to save lives and property and IFPCs main goal is to protect our communities by providing the best service and equipment to first responders. We help them have the best equipment on the market so they can do their jobs safely and efficiently.

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What would you say was your greatest business challenge before implementing Salesforce?

We didn’t have a CRM so it was difficult to track all of our contacts in one place as well as tracking the actual status of each quote or opportunity.

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What has been the biggest benefit you’ve seen from your Salesforce investment?

We now have visibility, through the use of Dashboards, to structure our sales teams with sales targets and real-time opportunities/sales status. In addition, Sales Reps now receive notifications when all the items from a sales order have arrived and are ready to be delivered. This was not possible with our previous software (Quickbooks).

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What advice would you give to small businesses thinking about whether they should implement Salesforce into their workflow?

Go for it! At first, the president of our company thought it was overkill for our small business. However, thanks to the help our implementation partner, Relay, we quickly were able to demonstrate that Salesforce would provide a solid foundation for our growth plans. I recommend implementing it together with a native accounting software like Accounting Seed to keep all your data in one system. Salesforce is more than just a CRM, it lets you build simple automations that can eliminate busy work.

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If you are interested in learning more about how Salesforce custom apps and integrations can help you run your business processes more efficiently and unlock insights into your operations, schedule a 30 minute consultation with one of our Salesforce Architects today or send us a message!