Fortune 500 company Rockwell Automation, Inc., (NYSE: ROK) provides industrial automation and digital transformation solutions to global customers across industries. As business grew and customer needs became more complex, Rockwell Automation needed a more comprehensive solution to manage sales and build strong customer relationships. The company adopted Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Power Apps, and Power BI to simplify and standardize tools for its global salesforce. Now sellers are empowered to connect with subject matter experts, streamline processes, and quickly provide the right information to customers to build relationships.
“Our sales team uses Dynamics 365 Sales to respond to questions with real-time insights, be proactive about opportunities, and get proposals generated more quickly than before.”
Tom Forster, Director of Global Sales Strategy and Commercial Readiness, Rockwell Automation
Automation for complex needs
Rockwell Automation, Inc., (NYSE: ROK) simplifies complexity for its customers. The company provides industrial automation and digital transformation solutions to drive productivity for manufacturers and suppliers across the globe. Headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Rockwell Automation has customers in more than 100 countries worldwide.
As the company evolved rapidly, so did the way it sells. Working with an international roster of customers, Rockwell Automation’s salesforce needed to offer expertise to help them find exactly what they needed. The team consisted of specialized salespeople and subject matter experts around the world, including 1,600 sellers, 400 sales managers, and 800 subject matter experts.
The sellers regularly interact with a wide range of customers with widely varied needs. They must offer solutions for machinery builders, system integrators, and the operations team at manufacturing plants. Key to the sellers’ success is a nuanced understanding of customer needs and Rockwell Automation’s 300,000 different products. To better address this kind of scale and complexity, Rockwell Automation wanted to transform how its sellers engaged with customers by building a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform on Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Changing customer relationship needs
Rockwell Automation had a CRM platform from another vendor, but it offered limited functionality. The sales team often found it easier to track information and manage customer interactions in Excel spreadsheets. With demand increasing, the company wanted to replace that manual process with something more scalable. Additionally, Rockwell Automation needed a centralized database where data could be easily stored, managed, and shared.
“Sellers spent a lot of time filling out spreadsheets, and the only real version of the truth we had was on that seller’s laptop,” says Tom Forster, Director of Global Sales Strategy and Commercial Readiness at Rockwell Automation. “We wanted to reduce all the manual effort, so sellers could spend optimal time actually engaging with customers and moving opportunities forward.”
Tools to evolve the global salesforce
Rockwell Automation needed a CRM tool that reduced manual processes, supported collaborative selling, and connected lead management with sales. It also needed to automate business process flows and provide visibility for a new way of selling at the company. Lastly, Rockwell Automation wanted to ensure that the tool was mobile and user-friendly. The sales advisory team began to look for a new cloud-based CRM and knew that it wanted to move to the cloud to increase speed, minimize maintenance and hardware, and reduce overhead costs. It considered options from SAP, Salesforce, and Microsoft.
Rockwell Automation adopted Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales as its CRM tool and is in the early phases of using the Field Service and Customer Service business applications. The Dynamics 365 deployment supported Rockwell Automation’s key priorities of demonstrating a customer-centric focus and boosting outcome-based selling, measured by customer loyalty and the addition of new customers. All sellers, including sales leadership, have access to Dynamics 365 and can connect with other sellers and groups across the company for increased collaboration. Having completed a successful rollout and change management process, Rockwell Automation now has very high adoption, with 71 percent monthly active usage.
The company plans to use Sales Insights, with advanced AI capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales, to gain additional insights on leads and sales data by using AI. Sales Insights brings together the skill and knowledge of sellers to help them make timely decisions, and Rockwell Automation is planning a pilot for mid-2020.
Encouraged by the success of Dynamics 365 Sales, Rockwell Automation took the opportunity to extend the capabilities of its customer engagement platform with Microsoft Power Platform. The company uses Microsoft Power Pages with Dynamics 365 Sales to help automate manual selling processes. It also uses Microsoft Power BI to perform analytics, provide data visualizations, and create reports quickly. All members of the salesforce now have common reports and dashboards instead of each region, subregion, or country creating its own version, which leads to consistency in reporting and less time creating duplicate reports.
“We didn’t have a transparent way to do reporting across the globe, so when a leader asked for overall results or funnel, the team had to merge various reports,” says Hugh Wellington, Director of Sales Execution at Rockwell Automation. “We now have Power BI set up for our executive audience, and they can access reports they need quickly because everything is in the same place.”
Better collaboration with experts
In the past, as customers and leads had become more globally distributed, it was hard for sellers at Rockwell Automation to know whom to contact or where to find relevant information. Now, with Dynamics 365, a seller can easily engage a subject matter expert without starting long email threads or filling out multiple forms. “Dynamics 365 transformed our engagement request functionality, so sellers do a better job of finding the right subject matter expertise and the right technology expertise, and they engage with customers at the right time in the selling cycle,” says Wellington.
Streamlining this process has made it easier for sellers and subject matter experts to collaborate, which reduces churn and helps connect the dispersed salesforce. Adds Forster, “With Dynamics 365, we decreased redundancy in our processes and gained visibility into who’s working on which accounts anywhere in the world.”
Increased efficiency and customer connection
The increased visibility and collaboration mean that sellers spend time truly helping customers and meeting their needs. In addition to collecting information on subject matter experts, Rockwell Automation also captures customer history, such as site visits, and previous conversations in one place, further reducing manual input. By providing comprehensive background, it increases seller confidence. “Our sales team uses Dynamics 365 Sales to respond to questions with real-time insights, be proactive about opportunities, and get proposals generated more quickly than before,” says Forster. “We’re driving simplicity, which increases speed and productivity.”
Rockwell Automation will continue to dive deeper into its use of Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform to support sellers as much as possible. Jodie Schroeder, Vice President of Global Commercial Operations at Rockwell Automation, concludes, “Our sellers say that Dynamics 365 helps them better engage customers and be more responsive. We’re showing our sellers that we’re invested in them by offering tools to support them and supplement their talents, which transforms how they engage with customers.”
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“We’re showing our sellers that we’re invested in them by offering tools to support them and supplement their talents, which transforms how they engage with customers.”
Jodie Schroeder, Vice President of Global Commercial Operations, Rockwell Automation
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