Transcript
Customer Case Study
Nortel
Nortel Boosts Sales Productivity and Centralizes Access to Sales Information with CRM
STORY AT A GLANCE Nortel is a telecommunications leader that found itself facing a distinctly changed business landscape in the new millennium. In this new market, its sales force needed to work more productively to generate the same revenue. Also, with diverse sales tools, Nortel management needed a more accurate view of its business with global customers. To improve sales productivity and visibility into accounts, Nortel created a new, consistent global sales process and rolled out Microsoft Dynamics® CRM, a customer relationship management solution. By involving the sales team throughout the process, Nortel experienced a smooth, rapid, and highly successful rollout of its new CRM system. For every hour that Nortel salespeople spend inputting data into the CRM system, they get at least two hours back in selling time. They have a much clearer view of their accounts and where they need to focus their efforts each week. Hundreds of employees across the company pull data from the CRM system to make better decisions on everything from marketing to manufacturing, and management can accurately view customer relationship status.
THE NEW WORLD OF WORK Companies of all sizes strive to make their sales force more efficient, because they understand that sales productivity translates directly into revenues. Nortel uses customer relationship management (CRM) software to help salespeople focus on the right opportunities and give management instant insight into the sales pipeline.
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Customer Case Study
As a leader in the Global Forecasting organization for Nortel, Dan Evans struggled to produce sales forecasts for the global telecommunications giant. With 2,000 salespeople working on 30,000 active deals across 150 countries, data arrived in a variety of formats, currencies, and languages. Evans’s organization spent several days each month normalizing and aggregating the figures. In just nine months, things changed. After implementing new sales-tracking software, Evans can now get a snapshot of the entire global sales pipeline in less than an hour. Managers throughout the company can get comprehensive, up-to-date views of the business. The sales force has more time to sell. And Nortel has created a wealth of sales best-practices and customer intelligence that it can use to extend sales and deepen customer intimacy. CREATE A MORE PRODUCTIVE ENVIRONMENT Based in Toronto, Canada, Nortel is a global communications company that offers a variety of carrier and enterprise solutions. Nortel successfully rode out the global telecommunications bust of the late 1990s and found itself navigating a subsequent slow market recovery as overbuilt capacity was consumed and demand picked up. “The IT, telecom, and media industries are converging, resulting in a much more competitive landscape with fewer large players,” explains Peter Finter, Vice President of Marketing for Nortel. “The large carriers have slowed their infrastructure purchases, but business enterprises are investing in communications technology to drive growth. These market changes impacted our sales productivity. Instead of selling very large solutions to solution providers, our salespeople are now chasing smaller deals. To generate the same revenue, they
have to sell more product.” With a relatively smaller sales force, by industry standards, Nortel needed to make its salespeople more productive. However, Nortel’s sales process and data-tracking tools were disparate and inconsistent across the organization. Each country managed its sales pipeline using a variety of customer relationship management (CRM) systems and spreadsheets. It was difficult for management to get an accurate view of the pipeline and of how much business Nortel was doing with large global customers. The sales force spent hours each week filling management reporting requests, which took them away from selling. “When executives visited a big customer, they wanted to know how much business we were doing with them,” Finter says. “Those requests took days to fulfill. Plus, because data collection methods varied, data accuracy was low and required many hours of manual work to validate the figures.” To succeed and grow, Nortel needed to create a single global sales process and implement a central sales-tracking tool to help its sales force focus on the right opportunities and work more productively. Having centralized sales data would also give Nortel management instant insight into sales activity and promote better decision making across the business. CREATING A NEW SALES PROCESS “We understood that simply deploying a new CRM across the company would not drive the business results we expected,” Finter says. Instead, the marketing teams worked with the sales organization to create a completely new sales process. The team worked with an outside consulting firm to pull best practices from other organizations and combine them Nortel’s own. Nortel piloted the new
LESSONS LEARNED • Engage users in the CRM selection process to ensure buy-in across the company. Make sure that the CRM system integrates with scheduling, e-mail, contact managers, and other tools that the sales force use. Announce that the company will use CRM data to run the business—and then use it. Don’t wait until the data is clean. Devise incentives to drive data cleanliness. Be clear on the data needed to run your business, and resist the temptation to create too many CRM fields. Datacollection time will reduce timesaving returns.
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Customer Case Study
process with seven sales teams, and within five months, the company introduced it to its 2,000 salespeople worldwide. However, Nortel realized that it needed to support the new sales process with a global sales-tracking tool that would create a single repository of data. Nortel turned to its sales teams for guidance in selecting the right tool. A team of 14 sales representatives and managers from four regions selected Microsoft Dynamics® CRM business software. “The Microsoft solution was the hands-down favorite, chiefly because of its familiar look and feel,” Evans says. “Our users were comfortable with it from day one.” Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides seamless integration with familiar products in the Microsoft® Office system, including the Microsoft Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client and Microsoft Office Excel® spreadsheet software, reducing learning and data-entry time and contributing to increased productivity. Microsoft Dynamics CRM also integrates well with non-Microsoft applications, so salespeople can access all the tools they need from a single work pane. Within four months of finalizing its new sales process, Nortel began to deploy Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Full global deployment of the tool to more than 3,500 users (2,000 salespeople and 1,500 technical sales, support, and management staff) in 80 countries took just nine months. “Adoption of CRM systems is legendarily abysmal,” Evans says. “We knew that if we asked salespeople to spend time putting information into the system, they would need to get twice as much information out of it to make it worthwhile.” To ensure that productivity gain, Nortel performed face-toface training with sales teams around the world to explain the new tool and the new sales process. “We also created a
comprehensive communications strategy to support the move to this new process and program,” Finter says. “We used executive webcasts, regular written communications, sales conferences, and other avenues to explain to the sales force how the new sales process program would benefit them.” GREATER DATA ACCURACY The Nortel sales team embraced the new sales process and software with enthusiasm. “Our initial reaction was ‘Wow,’” says Sean Fleck, Global Account Services Sales Leader for Nortel. “Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrated very well with what we were already doing in Office Outlook and Office Excel. The salespeople didn’t even realize that they were using another tool.” To ensure that salespeople were inputting complete and accurate data, Evans provided an incentive. “We made it clear that this was our one and only sales system, and if their deals weren’t in there accurately, they didn’t exist,” Evans says. He created a weekly data cleanliness scorecard that he publishes to the entire sales organization. “When people know that they’re being measured, they make a much bigger effort to be correct,” he says. “Plus, salespeople are very competitive. Using these public scorecards, we were able to improve data cleanliness from 68 to 91 percent in just three months.” INCREASED SALES PRODUCTIVITY Salespeople now have a personalized, concise view of their accounts and an easy way to monitor sales progress. For each account, they can see revenue year-todate, lifetime revenue, quota, and target revenue plan. “We have a much clearer view of what we need to do in each account,” Fleck says. “We can see the must-wins for the week or month, and
EXECUTIVE BIOGRAPHY Dan Evans’s position at Nortel is Leader, Global Forecasting Process/Tools. During his 24-year career with Nortel, Dan has held positions in Manufacturing, Production Control, Materials Planning, Quality, Purchasing, Marketing Operations, Sales Operations and Forecasting. A graduate of North Carolina State University, Dan is based at Nortel’s Research Triangle Park offices in North Carolina.
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where we need to put our focus to achieve sales goals.” Sales managers and the forecasting team no longer need to request data from the sales force; they simply turn to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “We have hundreds of reporting-only users that use the CRM system to get the information they need,” Evans says. “Our salespeople probably spend an extra hour a week inputting information, but they are getting two or more hours back to spend with customers, create presentations, and perform other sales activities. In time, we hope to process and win more deals, improve best practices and upsell opportunities, and, of course, increase revenue.” “As a sales manager, I am saving three to six hours a week in phone calls tracking down data, and a day per week in report creation,” Fleck adds.
sales practices, the supply chain, inventory, marketing, and manufacturing operations. “Seeing sales trends helps ensure that we’re building the right products,” Finter says. “We can improve sales performance by seeing whether specific marketing programs are working. It’s all about optimizing our people and serving customers better.” Nortel plans to integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM with other tools to drive deeper customer intimacy. For example, it wants to merge data from its CRM and supply-chain systems to provide a better view of the company’s ability to fill orders. The company also wants to build an online sales forum where salespeople can discuss opportunities and seek best practices. “Our CRM solution helps us create an incredible amount of business intelligence,” Evans says. “It’s making a huge difference in the effectiveness of our sales team and the success of our company and our customers.”
CUSTOMER DETAILS: Nortel Phone: (800) 4NORTEL Web site: www.nortel.com THE PEOPLE-READY BUSINESS A people-ready business is one where people can apply their unique skills, insights and experience to create new products and services, work responsively with customers and partners, and drive operational excellence in every aspect of the business. People-ready businesses support people with knowledge, practices and tools so that they can add the extra value that helps differentiate successful organizations in a competitive, fast-moving global economy. www.microsoft.com/peopleready SOFTWARE & SERVICES Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 2007 Microsoft Office system
INSTANT SNAPSHOT OF SALES PIPELINE Nortel now has a highly accurate, up-todate view of all deals in its sales pipeline and of all customer accounts. Evans’s team can now produce an accurate sales forecast in about an hour versus the two to four days required before. “Our view of our sales funnel for the next four quarters has grown significantly,” Evans says. “That’s a huge help in making business decisions. With the increased visibility and control, we can make better decisions about which business to pursue, make sure that our sales opportunities do not get stuck in one stage of the sales cycle, and manage our pipeline on a weekly versus a monthly basis.” IMPROVED CUSTOMER INSIGHT By continuing to build best practices and business intelligence, Nortel can better manage and improve customer service,
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published October 2008
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