From spreadsheet to sales engine, giving every team a single source of truth across a complex customer journey.
We rebuilt Fire Safety Australia’s Salesforce platform from the ground up, transforming it from an unstructured spreadsheet into an integrated, left-to-right workflow for sales, marketing, customer success and finance.
And with their full pipeline now in view, they’re prepped and ready for the next level of growth.
Client Background
Fire Safety Australia (FSA) is one of the country’s leading providers of emergency response and safety training, delivering thousands of accredited courses for corporate and government clients across Australia.
Whether they’re working with office fire wardens in Barangaroo or coal miners in Emerald, FSA trainers are on the ground at workplaces across Australia, preparing Australians to respond in a crisis.
But as demand for their courses continued to grow, Fire Safety Australia’s internal systems were struggling to cope with the extra volume and complexity with unique customer journeys for their 2 business divisions.
The Challenge
When Fire Safety Australia approached us to partner in their digital transformation, they’d already had Salesforce for 13 years. But it wasn’t working.
Running as a simplistic ‘out-of-the-box’ configuration, the set-up was geared towards sales lead tracking. But without any left-to-right data structure, it was more like an expensive contact spreadsheet than a sophisticated sales pipeline.
Without structure, it couldn’t handle the complexity of FSA’s quoting process, which had to account for multiple sites, courses, trainers and GST statuses. Which meant the sales team had no option but to create their quotes manually using a webform.
Outside of sales, each other business unit was using their own siloed systems.
- Customer Service were using booking software aXcelerate, manually re-entering the Sales team’s quotes and customer data from print outs.
- Finance was using MYOB to manage billings, invoicing clients when notified by Client Service, and creating financial reports manually based on sales data gained from in-person check-ins.
With so many disconnected systems, each team was spending hours on repetitive tasks and double data entry, maintaining separate files on the same customers with only clunky manual handovers in between.
It wasn’t the type of ‘critical incident’ Fire Safety Australia usually dealt with, but was clear that their legacy processes were causing daily fires and blocking their ambitious growth goals.
Our Solution
Fire Safety Australia’s project lead and CFO Vass Malanos, came to us with a clear goal for their project: help us turn Salesforce into a process that supports our real-life workflow and gives every team member full visibility of the customer pipeline.
‘We needed a single source of truth on the customer, and to make sure everyone could point to Salesforce from sales and marketing activity, right through to delivery and invoicing.” — Vass Malanos, CFO
Working closely with Vass and key members of each operational team, we started by rebuilding FSA’s basic Salesforce configuration into a seamless lead-to-invoice workflow.
Here’s what we did to get there:
1. Re-defined business processes and reflected them in Salesforce data structure
We started by building a structured data model that reflected the reality of how data was used within teams and how it flowed between them.
To do this, we worked with FSA to standardise their sales and booking process. This gave us a consistent workflow structure to replicate left-to-right in Salesforce, while also giving each team a new level of clarity on the process for selling products and servicing customers.
With processes mapped, we built out new data models for accounts, products, pricing and locations, allowing for courses to be associated with multiple sites/locations in a single quote.
“Previously there was no database that was controlling product and price information. Now we have real consistency and discipline around how products are sold. Plus full visibility of what we are selling.” — Vass Malanos, CFO
2. Created a single sales-to-success handover process
The clunky handover between Sales and Customer Service had become one of the biggest pain points for FSA. The transition from Salesforce and PDF quotes to aXcelerate was still reliant on printouts and email threads, and involved hours of data re-entry and plenty of room for mistakes.
Integration focus: Custom tool creation
To overcome the gap, we built a custom Training Plan tool with integrations to Salesforce, WordPress, and a workflow automation platform, Momentum.
Now, whenever a customer e-signs a quote, Salesforce automatically generates and shares a live, pre-filled ‘Training Plan’ document. This single document now travels with the client from quote to delivery, helping the customer service team lock in bookings faster, and with no unnecessary back and forth.
“Fluent Group has led a full redesign of the way that the business generates quotes. They go away and think about a problem, and then come back with a solution. And to turn that around quickly is amazing.” — Vass Malanos, CFO
3. Set robust, flexible foundations for automation and future expansion
In addition to restructuring current data and processes, we also worked with FSA to anticipate their future CRM needs, allowing us to lay the groundwork for potential expansions within our initial build.
This included implementing a data structure geared for future integrations with Xero (rather than for the current MYOB system) and also allowing for a scenario where bookings are managed directly through Salesforce.
Automation example: Streamlined quoting experience
The solid data foundation also allowed us to address pain points in FSA’s customer-facing processes, specifically the weeks-long back-and-forth needed to review and approve quotes.
In response, we designed an automated quote approval engine. By integrating Salesforce with Momentum, quotes can now be checked, modified and digitally signed by the customer within a single, seamless workflow. No email chains required.
The Results
1. A single source of truth on every customer
With the new Salesforce implementation up and running, every team at Fire Safety Australia now shares the same view of their customers.
“For the first time, everyone can see everything. Whether you’re a salesperson, a scheduler, a trainer, or in customer support, everyone is looking at the same details in Salesforce.” — Vass Malanos, CFO
This visibility has already had powerful effects on team collaboration and service delivery. Handovers are smooth, errors are reduced, and tasks no longer get lost if a staff member is unavailable.
“Invoices are going out correctly the first time. Customers are getting their preferred training dates more consistently. It’s already helping us meet our clients’ needs more efficiently.” — Vass Malanos, CFO
With Salesforce providing a backbone for the organisation, teams now share accountability for customers across the entire pipeline, rather than tapping out once their role is complete. This has unlocked new opportunities for teams to work together on organisation-wide goals.
“For example, our sales team now has visibility of unpaid invoices and can use their strong customer relationships to help the finance team collect on those.” — Vass Malanos, CFO
2. Faster turnarounds and customer confidence
The new Custom Training Plan has made the handover from sales to operations seamless and has had a measurable impact on the time taken to confirm training dates with customers.
“We’ve brought closing time for training plans down from about two weeks to two to five working days. It’s a neat little handover.” — Vass Malanos, CFO
With every detail captured in quotes now flowing accurately through to the Customer Service team, booking accuracy has also improved. Which has given customers a newfound confidence in the FSA team to get things right first time, every time.
“Customers are getting their preferred training dates faster and more reliably. And that’s a huge competitive advantage for us.”— Vass Malanos, CFO
3. Data-driven reporting and decisions
For the leadership team, visibility of the pipeline has become a critical source of impact for managing performance and planning for expansion. Instead of relying on anecdotal updates from sales staff, they can now identify trends and make forecasts based on accurate, real-time data.
“Previously, we were relying on conversations with individual team members that weren’t always rationalised or transparent. Now, if it’s not in Salesforce, it didn’t happen.”
— Vass Malanos, CFO
This new discipline has also allowed leaders to identify opportunities to develop the team and identify fresh opportunities for growth.
“We finally have the visibility to call out the gaps, focus the team, and report on questions we couldn’t before: which products sell best in certain markets or in which geographies?”— Vass Malanos, CFO
With real-time data at their fingertips, the FSA leadership team can now make confident decisions to drive efficiency today and plan for future growth.
The TL;DR: Quick wins, slow burns and ROI unlocked.
The newly-completed project is already unlocking both quick wins and slow-burn opportunities for the FSA, putting out the daily spot-fires caused by workflow gaps. And setting a resilient, flexible foundation for the organisation’s long-term expansion.
“When we think about the one-time build and the one-time cost, I’m confident we’ll get a return on our investment within six to twelve months.” — Vass Malanos, CFO
With the new system welcomed by leadership and front-line teams alike, Vass also emphasised the critical role choosing the right implementation partner played in his project’s success:
“It’s always hard to find the right partner. I’ve got to say, Fluent Group have been the best that I’ve ever dealt with. Their response time, their understanding, their capability to build quickly on a really tight timeframe — it’s been pretty awesome.” — Vass Malanos, CFO
Thanks, Vass, we think you and the FSA team are pretty awesome too.
