Barona's legacy CRM created siloed data, manual invoicing, and inconsistent sales processes, limiting visibility and growth across business units.
It implemented Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Service, integrated Power BI, and streamlined workflows to unify processes and enable AI readiness.
Barona unified its sales operations, improved reporting, eliminated manual invoicing, and boosted cross-team collaboration, resulting in greater efficiency and a better customer experience.
“Switching to Dynamics 365 gave us the opportunity to become ‘One Barona’ and have a standardized sales tool that everyone can use in the same way. That simplifies our sales processes and improves our data quality.”
Markku Metsola, Partnership Manager, Saranen, part of Barona
Barona offers a broad range of services designed to support organizations throughout the employee lifecycle. Recruitment and staffing remain core offerings, with more than 30,000 annual placements facilitated by over 300 recruitment consultants. Beyond staffing, Barona provides managed services and outsourcing solutions for functions such as customer service, IT helpdesk, logistics, and cybersecurity. The company also invests in learning and wellbeing programs such as “Elevated,” which enhance workforce resilience and skill development, and a “Wellbeing team” to support employee wellbeing at all levels. Barona, which operates through four main business areas and several subsidiaries, had used Salesforce since 2009, making it the oldest Salesforce customer in Finland. Over time, the system became overly complex, with unused fields and metadata, making further development difficult. In addition, inconsistent sales and invoicing processes across business units led to siloed data and operational inefficiencies.
“Each business area had its own sales lead and opportunity process, with different fields in Salesforce required for different opportunity types,” says Anna Volski, CRM Product Owner at Barona. “Salespeople also had to process invoices manually, which was time-consuming. Some business units weren’t even using CRM at all. They relied on pen and paper to track opportunities.”
A lack of unified customer visibility and fragmented integrations also limited cross-unit collaboration and reporting. “Ultimately, we needed to simplify the CRM system so it would be more user-friendly and standardized,” says Volski. Barona also wanted to prepare for AI adoption. “We wanted to implement a system that already had AI capabilities that we could start using when ready,” Volski adds.
Barona evaluated several CRM options before choosing Microsoft Dynamics 365 for its alignment with the Microsoft ecosystem, future AI capabilities, and cost-effectiveness. Working with Microsoft partner Bofor and the Microsoft FastTrack team, Barona implemented Dynamics 365 Sales to standardize account, lead, and opportunity management and unify sales stages including qualify, negotiation, order received, and won/lost. The company integrated Sales with HubSpot, a third-party system for automated lead management, and Vainu for updated account and contact data.
Barona also implemented Dynamics 365 Customer Service for case management, managing internal and external support tickets, with multiple support email queues for different systems. Finally, the organization integrated Power BI for comprehensive reporting on sales, invoicing, and customer activities.
The new Dynamics 365 environment was deployed across all business units in less than five months, supported by monthly meetings and dedicated channels for user engagement and feedback. “The Dynamics 365 implementation was quick and successful because we minimized custom configurations and had strong collaboration between teams,” Volski says.
With Dynamics 365, Barona has unified its sales and opportunity processes across all business units, replacing multiple legacy workflows and supporting the company’s new “One Barona” business strategy.
“Switching to Dynamics 365 gave us the opportunity to become ‘One Barona’ and have a standardized sales tool that everyone can use in the same way,” says Markku Metsola, Partnership Manager at Saranen, part of Barona. “That simplifies our sales processes and improves our data quality.”
The solution has also eliminated much of the manual work previously required. For example, sales teams previously had to manually move between fields to create and process invoices. Now, Dynamics 365 automates that exercise.
“We don’t have to do manual invoicing in Dynamics 365 because we have a single sales and opportunity process. Moving from opportunity to invoicing is more streamlined and faster than before,” Volski says. “This solution makes everything consistent across the board and helps us be more productive overall.” Salespeople can also more easily share leads with other business units, and those units can more quickly transfer the leads to opportunities in Sales.
“We don’t have to do manual invoicing in Dynamics 365 because we have a single sales and opportunity process. Moving from opportunity to invoicing is more streamlined and faster than before.”
Anna Volski, CRM Product Owner, Barona
By standardizing sales practices with Dynamics 365, Barona has improved cross-sell and collaboration between teams. Henri Pynnönen, Director of Sales at Barona, explains, “Moving from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 simplified our opportunity process and helped us share data throughout the company. As a result, we are better at cross-selling because we can see who is doing what throughout the entire process of moving a lead to an opportunity.” Adds Markku Metsola, Partnership Manager, Saranen, part of Barona, “Instead of each business unit doing their own thing, we can use the power of the entire group with Dynamics 365. We can sell the whole portfolio of services within the company, instead of just from one siloed unit.”
“Moving from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 simplified our opportunity process and helped us share data throughout the company. As a result, we are better at cross-selling because we can see who is doing what throughout the entire process of moving a lead to an opportunity.”
Henri Pynnönen, Director of Sales, Barona
Barona has improved its sales pipeline visibility through enhanced reporting in Power BI, which provides real-time data on invoicing, opportunities, and customer contacts. “In terms of reporting, Dynamics 365 is more logical than our previous CRM systems,” Pynnönen says. “Before, we had to use templates and know exactly which fields to select. If we chose the wrong template, the reports wouldn’t really work. With Dynamics 365, the data we need is visible and available in the system immediately.”
Salespeople can now manage customer contact lists through tasks and mark all appointments in one place. “With better visibility into the sales pipeline, we can clearly see where the business is going from a sales perspective,” Metsola says.
Previously, Barona struggled to manage support queues for internal support due to multiple systems. “Since moving to Dynamics 365, we no longer have queues, so we can respond faster and resolve internal cases quickly,” Volski says.
Barona is now enhancing customer service and user experience by rolling out a mobile app for Sales users and adopting AI tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales to automate routine tasks and deliver actionable insights. In addition, the company recently enabled an integration between Dynamics 365 and Outlook, which helps salespeople keep better track of their appointments. “Using Dynamics 365, we’re driving efficiencies and preparing for the future,” says Pynnönen.
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