Muotolevy, a versatile solution provider for all stages of real estate lifecycle, is a family-owned conglomerate formed by five companies, creating a more diverse entity than others of its size. Since 1974, Muotolevy has reached a stage where the company is aiming for growth and international expansion through diversified business development and enhancement.
As the Marketing Manager at Muotolevy, Markus Merinen has been with the company for a decade, giving him a clear understanding of where the company has come from, where it is now, and where it’s headed.
“Increasing scalability is the top priority for us. We’re currently reviewing all our processes and operational models and thinking about what we can do better and more efficiently. In order to grow profitably as a company and expand our operations internationally, we need to be able to scale everything we do,” Merinen explains.
Functional partner portal as differentiator
Muotolevy has been harnessing the power of Salesforce since 2014. Initially, the company started with Pardot (nowadays MCAE) as its sole marketing tool, but since then, they’ve broadened their horizons, expanding the platform’s use into other vital areas, such as sales development.
One of Muotolevy’s business units, Module, made a strategic decision to elevate its partnership operations through Salesforce. twoday Biit was chosen as the implementation partner for this project.
With twoday Biit’s assistance, Module adopted a partner portal built on Community Cloud (now known as Experience Cloud), which was immediately given ambitious targets.
“Our module sales are conducted through partners. We compete on the global market against many players. In these competitive markets, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to stand out solely based on products. Therefore, we started to explore differentiation from the perspective of our partners. How could we serve them in the best possible way? We felt that a partner portal built on Salesforce could be our distinct competitive edge.”
Merinen describes the project as highly successful.
“This system project has been the smoothest I’ve ever been involved in. Things kicked off with a top-notch Discovery phase, from which we moved through our internal wrangling to a really slick four-week implementation phase. The whole project took just eight weeks in total.”
Merinen also expresses satisfaction with the project outcomes. According to Merinen, they are now able to interact with their partners more actively, and they also have better visibility into their partners’ operations.
“Traditionally, we only get information about orders from partners, but with the partner portal, visibility continues even after we, for example, hand off a lead to a partner.”
Although the partner portal has only been in use for a few months, according to Merinen, it has significantly enhanced collaboration with the company’s partner network.
Even the feedback from partners has been positive, despite them having their own systems in place. However, lead generation acts as a carrot that partners find hard to resist.
“This activity is still fresh for us, but we’ve already got all our key partners on board. Moreover, the feedback has been positive. We’ve received particularly a lot of praise for the user interface.”
Co-operation continues with continuous development
Muotolevy is a typical company using Salesforce in the sense that they hardly have any Salesforce expertise in-house. In addition to marketing, Merinen is also responsible for developing Salesforce; however, he admits that he lacks the time or expertise for continuous incremental development.
That’s why Muotolevy has teamed up with twoday Biit for the platform’s ongoing development. Merinen is also pleased with this partnership arrangement.
“If you consider our Salesforce setup, we actually don’t have a strong internal admin who could take care of the ongoing maintenance and fine-tuning of the system. twoday Biit’s service model for continuous minor development is exactly what we need.”
In practice, Merinen’s task is to gather suggestions for system refinement from within the company. These development proposals are reviewed monthly with twoday Biit, at which time they also jointly decide which issues to advance next. Merinen believes that the absolute strength of this operating model is its flexibility.
“Our needs aren’t such that we require a dedicated, strong Salesforce expert. This way, we can flexibly develop our system whenever necessary, without having to commit to anything specific. However, continual communication and brainstorming are very beneficial because we get insights from twoday Biit about what issues we should consider.”