Hershey Creamery Company (Hershey’s Ice Cream) is one of the top 100 ice cream manufacturers in the US. The company sells more than 120 flavors of hand-dipped ice creams, sherbets, frozen yogurts, and novelty packaged desserts. Since 1894, Hershey’s has strived to guarantee quality products, provide excellent service, establish competitive prices, and provide true value to its customers. These days, the company has over 30 distribution hubs across the East Coast, in Texas and Nevada with 150 sales representatives in the field at any given time.
Keeping track of sales data was one of the key challenges for Hershey’s Ice Cream. “A lot of our time was being wasted on repetitive visits to accounts that were already disqualified,” recalled Steve Fisher, Sales Operations and Analytics Manager at Hershey’s Ice Cream. “So, seeing the effectiveness of having a better organization amongst our sales team is what led us to the decision to bring on Creatio.”
When searching for a suitable CRM solution, Hershey’s Ice Cream aimed for rapid implementation. However, they didn’t want to miss a chance to have the system tailored to their business needs. A scalable, highly customizable Creatio’s low-code platform for process management and CRM put away their concerns instantly. “After the implementation, we were still able to build out entire business processes and incorporate some unique solutions into the platform whenever we think of something new,” noted Tim Ryan, Regional Sales Manager at Hershey’s.
Hershey’s Ice Cream’s implementation project of Creatio demonstrates how change management efforts pay off. The company underwent a major digital sales transformation and was able to drive innovations effectively with the right strategy. “At first, it was tough to try to get some of the people who’ve been around for longer because the system was brand new to them,” Tim Ryan recalled. “Working individually with each salesperson at the start, we were trying to stress the importance of the vision of this project and communicate the benefits they would get from working with a CRM system. Thus, we were able to get everyone’s buy-in and ensure fast user adoption,” noted Ryan. “By implementing every single branch in person, we learned some things that they were missing from not having an all-encompassing CRM solution. We were able to receive a very helpful feedback from them and take it into account, thus adding some extra system features that could make our sales force more efficient.”
Creatio was implemented by Technology Advisors, Creatio’s valued partner. As Steve Fisher mentioned, “Technology Advisors have helped us tremendously in the past and continue to help us create, test, and implement new features that we discover would be useful as we continue using the system and become more involved in maximizing the system’s out-of-the-box capabilities and also some customizations that they built for us”.
Creatio interviewed Hershey’s Ice Cream team to learn the best practices of adopting and using the platform. In our recent interview, Tim Ryan and Steve Fisher share their experience of working with Creatio and talk about the system’s benefits that are the most significant to them.
