Sungevity is a solar energy company with a unique customer-focused model and product. This Little Duck were asked to develop the localised Australian version of the site. A major part of this project was a specialised iQuote widget which functioned as their primary sales funnel: collecting customer data by address, integrating it with a mapping app, and then feeding it into a custom Sales Force application.
About the project
Sungevity is a successful, multi-award winning solar energy company based in the US. It differs from most of its competitors through customer-first marketing and infrastructure: solar panels are custom-designed, savings are delivered up-front, and its sales are personalised using Salesforce.
A major driver for these sales is through its iQuote widget on its website, which acts as a sales funnel, hooking into geolocation, collecting customer information and then exporting that data into Salesforce.
This Little Duck was asked to provide a localised version of the Sungevity site for Australia, centering on the redevelopment of the iQuote widget for Australian mapping data and implementation of that into the localised version of Salesforce.
The goal was to keep the brand identity consistent across the Sungevity brand, but also ensure a frictionless user experience in their use of the iQuote widget.
Outcome
Sungevity launched in Australia in June 2012 alongside the fully localised version of their website. The website's in-bound marketing application integrated with their US-based Salesforce infrastructure. As sales volumes have increased over time, the Drupal application has continued to be a stable platform for new marketing campaigns and improvements to their online sales funnel.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen for the Australian Sungevity website because of the success that the American Sungevity site achieved with Drupal. It provided the best way to allow for flexible content types, multi-user content management, quick publishing and an active development platform for planning features in the future.
Technical Specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The Drupal application’s main job is to process inbound sales leads and export them to Salesforce - the modules which facilitate this functionality are the Salesforce and CCK modules. This is a Drupal 6 application so there wasn’t the option to create a custom entity for the inbound sales leads; the development team needed to choose between a custom database table or a custom node type for storing sales data and due to administration requirements and views integration a custom node type was chosen using the power of CCK to create the requisite fields.
The contrib Salesforce module made it easy to design mappings between the CCK fields in the Drupal application and the corresponding fields in Salesforce where the data was being exported.
