The sales team were able to produce quotations ten times faster with Microsoft CRM

Organisation

Avnet Services, http://www.avnet.com.au/cloud.html, a division of Avnet Technology Solutions (Aust) Ltd, are a provider of hosting solutions and virtual hardware to both resellers and direct clients. They guarantee a higher level of uptime (99.999%) than anyone else.

Challenge

Avnet Services had deployed Microsoft CRM a couple of years previously using internal resources who did not fully understand CRM. The initial implementation did not really meet the operational needs of the organisation which had grown significantly, and was being used as a glorified address book. Their quotation process was conducted completely outside of CRM, required manipulation of a complex spreadsheet to generate prices and then copying this into Word - just to send out a proposal to their prospects. The proposal then required further editing to meet the unique needs of that proposal.

Solution

Opsis were invited to assist Avnet Services to get better use from Microsoft CRM. We have enabled Avnet Services to manage their entire sales cycle through Microsoft CRM by:

1. Bringing all of the large and frequently changing product catalogue into CRM
2. Automating all of the follow up reminders required to close a sale, and
3. Creating proposal templates.

Benefits

The results have been exceptional.

1. Reduced the time for producing a quotation from up to two hours down to as little as 10 minutes. These proposal documents have exactly the look and feel that Avnet Services need.
2. Automated much of the sales cycle taking many of the previously manual processes and handing them to CRM to look after.
3. Provided a much better view of the pipeline with alerts generated automatically, so that they are able to easily maintain regular contact with their key clients.
4. The revamped CRM has also made managing the frequent price changes of their complex price list relatively easy.

As part of our solution we also trained all Avnet Services sales staff so they were able to take full advantage of the new functionality.

The future plans for the solution include extending the use of the sales process to the solution delivery team, integrating it to their invoicing system and making managing their pricelists in multiple currencies easier.