November 14, 2013 Ken Jacobsen

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Yields Impressive Results with Nationally Recognized Bakery Manufacturer and Distributor

One of our clients is a large, well-known Midwestern baking mix organization that is family owned and operated and has been in the flour milling business since the early 1800s. The organization, recognizing the need to implement a solution that would assist its sales team in further advancing company growth and revenue, selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.
Prior to implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, the company was entering correspondence and data within Microsoft Outlook and utilizing Excel spreadsheets to track them. This entailed tedious processes and a lot of extra messaging and communicating among the sales team. The tight integration between Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Outlook really helped the company achieve user adoption. Its sales and marketing people were already used to working in Microsoft Outlook to email messages, schedule appointments, and enter new contacts. The Microsoft Outlook add-in for Microsoft Dynamics CRM helped reduce the learning curve and the training required.
One of the CRM project’s major challenges was getting users to stop relying on their manual spreadsheets and to automate their processes instead. The TM Group supplied templates that automated emails and other communications to prospects and leads . An evaluation will take place every 60–90 days to monitor the progress of the instituted workflows, and new workflows will be added for further process automation.
The company participates in a variety of trade shows and events throughout the year. It needed a comprehensive and efficient way of both creating leads and organizing the sales team’s follow-up on its trade show leads. Sales prospects, distributors, and individual companies all needed to be qualified and tracked, as did the various types of communication, the samples delivered or consumed, and the recipes sent to the qualified lead. Now, when a lead is qualified, it’s converted into an opportunity and tracked in the company’s sales pipeline.
With Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, all the sales team’s leads and opportunities are now in one central database location, where everyone has access to all the history, including phone calls, communication messages, and credit documentation. Employees no longer have to manually replicate this information from multiple systems, which has greatly increased productivity and is also providing, via email with detailed conversation notes, more accurate information on how many times the prospects/leads are contacted.
The company has shortened its sales cycles and created a more focused process with a modern, up-to-date technology that is so easy to use. Other benefits include increased sales team productivity and the ease of having all the information needed right at one’s fingertips. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online has provided superior flexibility for this company’s sales team, allowing team members to utilize prospects’ and clients’ data and information, however they prefer—within Microsoft Outlook, in a browser, or on a mobile device.
Presently, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is contained in the company’s service division; distribution for its products is narrowed to prisons, jails, schools, and nonprofit organizations. Eventually the rest of the organization will be rolled out to the corporate distribution chain (grocery stores, retail stores, and restaurants).

Published originally on www.crmsoftwareblog.com

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