GCCASalesforce Implementation

Moving Mountains, Delivering Solutions: How Global Cold Chain Alliance Keeps Its Cool with Salesforce Solutions

Project Goals

fusionSpan’s team built a custom Salesforce system capable of supporting GCCA’s growing volume needs. This project improved user interface, membership access, and streamlined payment processing.

The Global Cold Chain Alliance (GCCA) – an international association representing all major industries engaged in temperature-controlled warehousing, logistics and transportation – is committed to uniting all of its partners on a singular goal: to find innovative solutions that benefit the transportation of perishable products globally.

The primary challenge GCCA faced was a need to replace the organization’s legacy association management system (AMS)/CRM system: Netforum Enterprise. The organization was focused on streamlining many of its processes and was running into complications meeting its evolving business needs — in particular, supporting global customers during COVID. Netforum had become overly configured, which made it difficult to make updates and changes as new requirements arose.

In 2021, GCCA partnered with fusionSpan to undergo a full technology assessment; the initial focus was on assisting GCCA staff in understanding the organization’s current technology stack and the value each tool was (or was not) providing. Next, recommendations for a more effective tech solution were made.

fusionSpan began by recommending GCCA make a transition to Salesforce for all their CRM/Association Management System requirements. Throughout the process, fusionSpan worked closely with GCCA for Salesforce CRM, Experience Cloud, and Pardot Implementations.

The fusionSpan team also leveraged AppExchange products to extend the Salesforce Platform for aspects, including Event Management. Then, the fusionSpan and GCCA teams worked through an extensive discovery and design process to ensure that the Salesforce build met GCCA’s unique business requirements.

Inside the project

Project Challenges

Data access and management can be an ongoing challenge, even when things are running optimally. During this crucial period of growth, extracting usable data was more important than ever for GCCA.

Navigating this project during a period of unprecedented growth brought fusionSpan’s team a few specific challenges:

Rapid Growth and Data Management:

While fusionSpan was working on this project with GCCA, GCCA continued to see growth. This type of growth, coupled with the existing inefficient systems and the inability to extract and use crucial data created a true urgency for this project. Not only did the team need to provide GCCA with a working system quickly, they also needed to help GCCA keep up with their current business during the process.

A Mobile, Busy Partner:

During this time of growth, GCCA was on the go, keeping the industries they served supplied with everything they needed to properly serve their clients. This meant fusionSpan had to adapt to a flexible communications cadence, which could have risked slowing the project down.

Global Payment Processing Needs:

GCCA receives payments from members which had the potential to create additional burden for the GCCA team. fusionSpan was tasked with finding a solution for payment processing that would still give GCCA the pertinent data it needed to operate at its best, without slowing the team down or preventing them from focusing on their business goals.

Solutions and Outcomes

The final outcome for this project with GCCA? A highly functional custom Salesforce system that’s been customized to suit GCCA now, and as it continues to grow in the future.

33% improvement in revenue pipeline and forecast visibility

100% improvement in cart abandonment visibility (otherwise known as previously lost revenue)

GCCA leveraged base Salesforce to create a truly custom system that addressed all of GCCA’s needs. Incorporating existing software components, like Blackthorn, Pardot, and Stripe, fusionSpan was able to offer GCCA a custom Salesforce build that met current needs and gave them flexibility to evolve in the future with changing needs.

Here are a few of the key steps that took place:

Custom Join Process utilizing Salesforce Flows: This allowed for a streamlined join process for all types of memberships to allow for quick data collection, membership assignments.
Creation of Membership Terms and Products: Utilizing base Sales Cloud functionality, our team focused on the creation of Pricebooks for each region worldwide for all memberships. “Terms” Objects were created to allow for membership terms to be assigned, tracked and reported on based on the membership type selected.
“Member” vs “Non-Member” Experience Cloud Page Variations: The fusionSpan team leveraged Salesforce’s Audiences functionality to meet GCCA’s need to have “Member” vs “Non-Member” views in the Experience Cloud portal to allow for a personalized feel for everyone logging in.
Domain Matching New User Registration: fusionSpan configured a custom New User Registration that allows for users to align themselves with the correct organization during the New User Registration, based on email domain.
Full Stripe integration: Addressing the purchasing process was a high priority for the team. To give GCCA what it needed without hindering their day-to-day work, fusionSpan did a complete Stripe integration with the custom Salesforce build. This allows Stripe to do the heavy lifting, including all nuanced tax needs and regulations, while also storing all of the sales information in the Salesforce system, giving GCCA accurate and always up-to-date data.

As with every customer story, however, optimized tools and efficient implementations improve daily. fusionSpan today supports GCCA with dedicated, ongoing Administrator support, and is standing by to help the company’s global presence keep its cool — especially when unexpected challenges heat things up.