Summary
Hydra-Grene A/S is a specialized trading and engineering company with core competencies in trading, production and know-how in hydraulic components, turnkey solutions and systems, hoses and fittings. Hydra-Grene takes pride in having the broadest range of hydraulic components and systems available anywhere on the market.
Hydra-Grene A/S needed a Customer Relation Management business application on Office 365 to accelerate and increase sales in a highly competitive and price sensitive market. iGlobe CRM Office 365, Microsoft Flow, Planner, PowerApps, and Power BI, helps them organize and accelerate their sales process, while creating a centralized, collaborative resource for their front and back-end sales team.
Challenge
Being a market leader in terms of hydraulic component sales, advisory services, and hydraulic system production requires knowledge of customer demand, suppliers offering, and competitor pricing. There is information and history that needs to be captured and shared. In a highly competitive and price sensitive market, delivering quality services and after-service is essential, and attention to details matters, particularly as it pertains to customer relations and collaborating with other workers. Hydra-Grene A/S success is tied to delivering the correct price, best product quality, and great customer experience on every sale and that means managing those details.
Capturing competitor pricing is often done by front-end sales. A challenge is to enable an easy way to enter and share competitor pricing on a customer level that is important to both front and back-end sales. For Hydra Grene A/S, this information should be aggregated allowing them to get a more accurate view of competitor pricing for products and customer segment.
Internal communication and knowledge sharing between front-end sales and back-end sales is challenging. Hydra-Grene A/S engages with existing and potential customers in many ways. Front-end sales team members are often on the road visiting customers, while a back-end team provides support directly to customers and to the front-end sales team. This requires easy access to information and a high level of collaboration. For example, after a customer meeting, a front-end sales representative should be able to create a meeting report on the road and the back-end team should have access to that meeting report, should the customer call. In addition, a back-end team should be able to add more information to the meeting report that will be relevant for front-end sales before entering the next meeting. The front-end sales teams can then use those augmented meeting reports to learn about the latest activities on a customer before they enter a meeting.
Finally, Hydra-Grene wanted to have a simple contract management tool with notification for contract renewals.
Strategy
Using Microsoft Office 365 as a cloud platform and business applications platform, Hydra-Grene A/S needed a solution to help the sales team to be proactive by giving them access to up-to-date customer information that they can easily edit – at the office, on the road, anytime and anyplace. The ideal solution would allow them to manage their customer relations, meeting reports, competitor pricing, email documentation, history, and tasks, and, importantly, allow both back-end and front-end sales team to collaborate. Finally, Hydra-Grene wanted to automate notification processes for tasks management and contract renewals.
The solution should also provide a user-friendly environment that can be accessed from different devices, both at the office and in the field, and is seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Office 365. In addition, Hydra-Grene A/S wanted to be able to customize the solution to their specific needs without being affected by standard updates from Microsoft or the solution provider. The organization wanted to realize Microsoft’s promise, of always being on the latest version with no additional cost.
The solution was to use Office 365 with Microsoft Flow, PowerApps and Power BI, as well as iGlobe CRM Office 365 – a tightly integrated Office 365 service available on any device. By combining iGlobe CRM Office 365 and Office 365, Hydra-Grene A/S got a business application where iGlobe CRM became a part of Office 365 as an additional tightly integrated service. The solution is accessed seamlessly across Office 365, from Outlook to Planner, SharePoint, Flow, Power BI, and with PowerApps, providing mobile capabilities for iGlobe CRM. Beside getting what you can expect of a CRM application Hydra Grene got:
- Microsoft Flow automated notification between front-end and back-end sales team
- Microsoft Flow notification for customer and meeting report follow-up
- Microsoft Flow notification for contract renewals
- Task management using a Plan from Planner that is connected to iGlobe CRM
- A simple customization to iGlobe CRM with an integrated SharePoint list for customer competitor pricing, providing an easy way to manage the challenge with handling competitor pricing
- Delivery of insights about customers, segments, competitor pricing, and sales processes with Power BI reporting for iGlobe CRM using user-friendly and clickable dashboards
- Mobile capabilities through PowerApps for iGlobe CRM giving teams access to the latest customer meeting reports
Finally, Office 365 Add-ins for iGlobe CRM like, iGlobe Outlook CRM Add-in and iPlanner Pro provide a digital workplace to enable deeper collaboration within the sales team and across the entire organization.
Results
Whether they’re in administration, front-end sales, back-end sales, or management, Hydra-Grene A/S employees now have one platform for communication, collaboration, reporting, documentation, and customer information. Through iGlobe CRM, employees are able to deliver the correct price and quality for each customer, and they now have the means of managing the details. This has simplified their business processes and helped them ensure that their offering is of top quality and that they continue being a market leader.
