In today’s modern sales environment a trend is surfacing among B2B sellers and buyers: the desire for more authentic, personalized relationships. But despite the desire for personalized relationships, purchasing involves more people than ever, and successful sales require sellers to navigate an increasingly large group of stakeholders.
While increasingly large groups of stakeholders may create complexity in relationship building, it also opens the door to uncovering additional customer needs. If your organization is equipped with the tools needed to successfully implement a customer-centric perspective, you can turn complexity into opportunity, and not only build trusted relationships with your customers but also uncover the insights needed to turn relationships into revenue.
C.H. Robinson improves visibility into customer needs with Microsoft Dynamics 365
Global logistics company C.H. Robison is no stranger to solving complex problems for their more than 119,000 customers. When they needed a better way to capture customer needs and catalog them centrally, they turned to Microsoft.
C.H. Robinson empowered their organization to dive deeper into uncovering what their customers need and better articulate all that they can do for their customers by deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Power Apps, and Microsoft Power BI. C.H. Robison realized the benefits at a rapid pace, and achieved full ROI in 11 months, a full six months ahead of the projected schedule.
With Dynamics 365, C.H. Robinson implemented a digital transformation that resulted in 5 key takeaways:
- Increased focus on the customer and potential opportunities: C.H. Robinson utilized Dynamics 365 Sales and Power Apps to create a canvas app that could streamline the capture of detailed customer data. Salespeople can use Dynamics 365 Sales to fluidly input and access detailed customer data at any point while talking to customers, which helps salespeople maintain focus on the customer and opportunity.
- Immediate visibility into unmet customer needs: Just as important as solving surfaced problems is not missing the chance to solve for additional unmet needs. Using a Power BI dashboard embedded in Dynamics 365, C.H. Robinson’s salespeople and account managers can more efficiently identify opportunities and plan out the next actions to take to meet customer needs.
- Full deployment in six months, training included: Over the course of three “go lives” beginning in June 2019, Dynamics 365 Sales was deployed to 3,000 people at C.H. Robinson, 90 percent of whom use it at least once a month. PowerObjects, an HCL Technologies company and a Microsoft Partner Network member with Gold competencies, facilitated the rollout with a series of “leadership change workshops” and training sessions, ensuring everyone understood the “why” in addition to the “what” and “how.”
- A foundation for further business transformation: As just the first phase of all-up digital transformation, C.H. Robinson now has insights into Microsoft features, functionality, and technology that can expand their innovation and outcomes. James Santy, Vice President of Sales Operations at C.H. Robinson, notes that, “Throughout our journey, Microsoft has been by our side every step of the way. Based on our tremendous success to date, we’re eager to consider other business applications from Microsoft.”
- A centralized, 360-degree view of each customer: The deployment of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform has resulted in C.H. Robinson creating and capturing 14,000 individuals sales opportunities in the first six months, and an increase in the quality of data by 89 percent. They owe it all to the centralized repository of accurate and trusted data within Dynamics 365 Sales that can be used to identify, prioritize, and close opportunities.
In addition to opportunities, ROI, and data quality, C.H. Robinson is seeing another key metric increase: customer happiness.
“We embarked on our digital transformation because our customers were giving us feedback that they needed us to help them in new ways … we still have work to do, but today, with Dynamics 365, we now have the foundation we need to get there.”—James Santy, Vice President of Sales Operations, C.H. Robinson
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Read the full story to learn how C.H. Robinson gained actionable insights into their customers’ needs.
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