Summary

Chicago Based Printing Company Replaces Salesforce with Microsoft Dynamics CRM

 

The Client

Our client is a successful family owned printing services company founded in 1929. This client provides a variety of printing services, including short run, wide format, fine art, banners and graphics, and managed printing services.  They take pride in providing excellent customer service and quick response to their printing requirements.

 

The Opportunity

Our client had been using Sales Force CRM for a number of years with the basic CRM functionality of Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities. However, a great deal of their business was focused on quick turn-around of quotes for printing projects from a simple brochure to full color Outdoor Banners. This was not currently being tracked inside of Sales Force CRM, and they did not want to go thru the steps of creating an opportunity and then create a quote, the traditional sales process. This growing business was looking for a simpler method to capture this information inside of CRM right from the start of the quote process.

A customer could phone, email, or visit their web site to generate a quote request. This was a very important part of their business that management wanted to develop greater visibility and insight of this process from receipt of the quote to placement of an order.  The solution had to fit the flow of their business, for both outside sales, and the inside sales team, without a lot of extra data entry and burden on their inside sales staff. It was very important that the inside sales team, which had no previous exposure to CRM, would buy off on this concept, and use it in their everyday quote process.

 

The Logan Consulting Solution

Logan Consulting spent time to understand the needs of the inside sales team, and the typical flow of quoting printing jobs. Of particular importance was incorporating the volume of quote received directly via email and from the web site. Logan Consulting crafted a Microsoft CRM online solution that incorporated the traditional Account, Contact, and Opportunity functions of traditional CRM along with a unique solution that routed email based quote requests directly into CRM. This direct Email to Quote solution allowed inside sales staff to directly handle email within CRM, and create Quotes that consolidated multiple Quotes from their in-house quoting system under one main Quote in CRM. These quotes would automatically link with customer already in the CRM database, and new customers could easily be added, capturing all of the interactions within CRM. Automated workflows move the process from a draft quote to won or lost quote with minimal intervention, and provide alerts to expiring quotes for follow-up. Logan also constructed a number of data views and dashboards to provide real time views of the entire quote process from start to finish. Prior to going live on the new Microsoft CRM system, Logan migrated legacy data from Sales Force CRM, and added information from their ERP system that was not contained in Sales Force.

 

The Results

Our client now enjoys a 360 degree view of customer interaction on both inside sales and outside sales. Putting the quoting process within CRM allows them to capture these customer touch points, and provides analytics that were not possible previously. Every quote request coming from email or the web site is now tracked inside of Microsoft CRM. Tight integration with Outlook, allows the inside sales team to access CRM within the framework of a familiar tool.

From a marketing perspective additional benefits included capture of emails that came in thru the quotes that were looking for general information on their business, and even lost quotes provide opportunities for future business, as all related customer and contact information is now captured in CRM. This sets the stage to use third party tools to enhance CRM’s email marketing capabilities.

 

Next Steps

Replace your old ways of doing business with a modern, secure, and customizable system that already works with the Microsoft Office tools that your team is familiar with – Teams, Outlook, Excel & Word. Choose Microsoft Dynamics 365 for managing Sales and Customer Service interactions, and Marketing Outreach programs.

Logan Consulting, your Chicago-based consulting firm, has helped clients across the nation find their full potential every day. Stop losing revenue opportunities and start managing your company efficiently. Talk to us and watch your digital transformation begin.