Supercharging the Rockwell Automation Sales Team

Since the introduction of spreadsheet applications in the late 1970s, their value and utility have evolved far beyond accounting and bookkeeping. The ability to sort, manipulate, format, calculate, and display data makes spreadsheets among the most frequently used applications in business.

Spreadsheets, however, have their shortcomings, as the Rockwell Automation sales team was learning the hard way a few years ago. Despite a product catalog of over 300,000 items, a sales force of over 1,600, and customers in over 100 countries, the provider of industrial automation equipment and digital transformation tools was managing its sales activities largely on spreadsheets.

The sales team relied on spreadsheets because their existing CRM solution was difficult to use and offered limited functionality. But without a centralized system with a single version of the truth, collaboration capabilities, and customer interaction tracking, the Rockwell Automation sales associates found themselves spending valuable time manually updating spreadsheets and communicating by email.

Rockwell Automation’s leadership recognized that this situation was not scalable or sustainable, and turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to replace their CRM solution.

Microsoft Dynamics 356 Sales addressed all of Rockwell Automation’s major pain points:

• It enabled sales associates to more easily identify and collaborate with internal subject matter experts to drive solutions for specific customer needs.
• It centralized all their customer information in a single cloud-based platform, including site visits and other interaction history, eliminating the hundreds of data silos on individual sales associate laptops.
• The end-to-end sales cycle management capabilities enabled seamless connection of lead generation and sales activities.

Moreover, the reduction in manual processes gave sales associates more time to do what they do best: Help their customers get the best solutions to their business problems and remain connected with their customers before, during, and after the sale.

Do You Stop the Sales Process When the Deal Is Won?

If your team’s sales process stops when the customer says “yes,” you aren’t serving your customer as well as you could be, and you might be reducing the lifetime value of that customer. And it might not be a shortcoming of your sales process or your team members–it could be your tools holding you back. Does your CRM support the sales process all the way through–and after–customer onboarding? Does your sales team have insight to the onboarding process?

If you suspect that your CRM is failing to support the onboarding process, take advantage of Empellor CRM’s “Self- Assessing Your CRM & Process Strategy Checklist.” With this checklist as a guide, you can determine if your current CRM is serving your needs, both today and in the future. You may find, as Rockwell Automation did, that it’s time for an investment in a more capable CRM solution, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales.