Case Study · Airius · Manufacturing
Airius was losing web leads and approving discounts by hand. Now Salesforce runs the whole order.
A commercial-fan manufacturer had web leads that never reached Salesforce, discount approvals handled over email, and returns tracked outside the system entirely. As their ongoing Salesforce team, we built the full order lifecycle - quote, approval, shipping, returns - and connected their WooCommerce store so a web quote becomes a real record in minutes.
Industry
Manufacturing (commercial fans & air purification)
Platform
Salesforce Sales Cloud + CPQ
Timeline
Ongoing, 18+ months
Outcome
The full order lifecycle in one system
The challenge
Airius: a manufacturer whose CRM stopped at the quote
Airius makes destratification fans and air-purification products for commercial and residential buildings, selling through direct reps, resellers, and a WooCommerce request-a-quote store. Salesforce with CPQ handled quoting, but everything around it leaked: web leads generated a notification without ever creating a lead, discounts were approved by email, and returns and work orders were tracked by hand outside the system. Leadership had no reliable view of closing rates or progress to goal.
Web leads that never arrived
The sales team got an email saying a new lead had come in - but no lead appeared in Salesforce, and the ones that did were riddled with duplicates and dropped data on conversion.
Discounts approved over email
There was no governed approval path - discounts above a threshold were signed off in email threads, with no record and no consistency.
Notification noise
Reps were getting three separate notification emails for every single new lead.
Returns tracked by hand
RMAs and work orders lived outside Salesforce, with ship-to details entered manually and inconsistently.
No view of the business
Leadership wanted closing rates, a leaderboard, a forecast, and live progress to monthly goals - none of which existed.
A store that would not connect
The WooCommerce request-a-quote plugin had no integration path - quotes placed online simply did not reach Salesforce.
The architecture
Extend the CRM past the quote, all the way to the return
Salesforce already handled quoting; we built everything around it - governed approvals, a real order pipeline, a returns process, and a custom-coded WooCommerce integration - so a customer's whole journey lives in one system.
Sources
Extended by Cloudsheer
Outcomes
What we built
A custom WooCommerce integration
Hand-built Apex connecting the store to Salesforce: a quote placed on WooCommerce becomes a lead with line items in Salesforce within five minutes, matched to products by SKU, and auto-converts on a completed checkout into an account, contact, closed-won opportunity, and work order.
Governed discount approvals
Two approval processes - one for resellers, one for everyone else - with automatic approval up to each tier's threshold and routing to named approvers above it. No more email threads.
The full order pipeline
A rebuilt pipeline through ordered, shipped, and closed, with invoice and tracking fields and an automatic "your order has shipped" email - so the record follows the order, not just the sale.
A returns and work-order process
Custom RMA and work-order objects with a return-by date, a reminder flow, and one-click PDF generation - the returns process that used to live on paper, now in Salesforce with bounce-proof email.
Web leads that actually land
Website forms re-pointed from the old marketing tool straight into Salesforce through a connected app, with duplicate rules and parent-lead linking, and the triple notification collapsed to one.
Leadership dashboards
Sales-team, leadership, and per-rep dashboards, a monthly goal-progress gauge, and order and returns reporting - the visibility leadership had been asking for.
A cleaner quote
A quote template with a card-authorization page, automatic payment terms, and a processing-fee line, plus a refreshed price book - after we found a legacy rule silently overwriting CPQ pricing on every new quote.
How we did it
Extending the CRM from the quote all the way to the return
Airius had Salesforce with CPQ handling quotes, and everything on either side of the quote leaking out of the system. Web leads produced a notification email but no actual lead record. Discounts were approved in email threads. Returns and work orders were tracked by hand outside Salesforce entirely. Leadership had no reliable view of closing rates or progress to goal. Our job over eighteen months was to make the CRM cover the whole order lifecycle, not just the middle of it.
The capstone was a custom WooCommerce integration, built in Apex against named credentials with custom-metadata field mapping. A quote placed on the store now becomes a lead with line items in Salesforce within five minutes, matched to products by SKU, and on a completed checkout it auto-converts into an account, contact, closed-won opportunity, and work order. We verified it end to end with live quotes - an eight-unit Air Pear order, a purification-nozzle quote - watching them appear in Salesforce inside the five-minute window.
Around that we governed the parts that had been informal. Two approval processes, one for resellers and one for everyone else, approve discounts automatically up to each tier's threshold and route anything above it to named approvers, replacing the email sign-offs. We built custom RMA and work-order objects with a return-by date, a reminder flow, and one-click PDF generation, moving the returns process off paper. Web forms were re-pointed from the old marketing tool straight into Salesforce through a connected app, with duplicate rules and parent-lead linking, and the three notification emails per lead were collapsed to one.
One detail is a good illustration of managed work: quotes kept coming out with the wrong prices, and the cause turned out to be a legacy workflow rule silently overwriting the CPQ price book on every new quote. Finding and removing it fixed a problem the team had lived with for so long they had stopped questioning it. On top of the fixed lifecycle we built the leadership dashboards and the live monthly goal gauge that gave the business the visibility it had been missing.
How we delivered
Ongoing, 18+ months, start to finish
Govern the basics
Late 2024: discount approvals, the order pipeline, shipping emails, and the first dashboards.
Fix lead capture
Early 2025: web forms re-pointed into Salesforce, email marketing connected, duplicate rules in place.
Build returns
Mid 2025: the RMA and work-order objects, reminder flow, and one-click return documents.
Harden it
Late 2025: sharing rules, RMA auto-fill, bounce handling, and 2026 goal tracking.
Connect the store
Early 2026: the custom WooCommerce integration built in Apex and taken live in production.
The results
What changed for the business
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Web quotes | Notification only, no record | A Salesforce record in 5 minutes |
| Discount approvals | Over email | Automated by reseller tier |
| Lead notifications | 3 emails per lead | 1 |
| Returns | Tracked by hand | RMA objects with auto-generated PDFs |
| Order pipeline | Stopped at the quote | Quote through shipped and closed |
| Leadership view | None | Dashboards and live goal progress |
Does your CRM stop at the quote?
Book a free 30-minute scoping call. We will look at where your order lifecycle falls out of Salesforce - web leads, approvals, shipping, returns - and hand you a plan to bring it back in, at no cost.
Client identifying details have been anonymized at the client's request. Metrics reflect the outcomes of a real engagement.