Sage Success Story AIS by Sage CRM

Sage CRM Customer Success

AIS streamline their sales process with Sage CRM

Customer AIS Industry Services Location Dublin, Ireland Solution Sage CRM

‘There are no worries about leads falling through the cracks and not being converted.’ Wayne Fenlon Sales Manager AIS

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Background story AIS (www.aisltd.ie) supplies end-of-line packaging systems, labelling machinery, machine vision and barcode systems to large manufacturing companies, including the food and beverage sector and multinational life science and pharmaceutical companies in Ireland. More than half of its 35 employees are out on the road, either sales people drumming up business or engineers looking after existing customers. Paper-based CRM processes poorly served their needs. The sales team used Excel spreadsheets for leads and opportunities that occasionally got lost.

Essentially, the firm wanted to mobilise its customer database and create a central repository for all customer information, accessible by sales, engineers and customer service. Key to success AIS used Sage 50 for accounts which helped in deciding the most suitable CRM product for the business. “We knew from using Sage 50 that Sage support and customer service was always there and the sales team were immediately enthusiastic about Sage CRM” said Fenlon.

Sales Manager Wayne Fenlon was frustrated with the old way of doing things and wanted to streamline the sales process and be able to generate reports that could be quickly collated. “I would have to spend the weekend going through paperwork to prepare for the weekly sales meeting,” he said. “We needed to get access to customer information much more easily.”

Alongside the features and functionality that support its mobilisation strategy, the other big selling point was how easy it was to customise. After two days training, the AIS team was using the existing workflow engine and within two months they were tweaking it to better suit their needs. It’s now set up for administrators to take a sales enquiry, save it to the system and assign a sales person who automatically receives the details in their inbox.

Challenge A growing company with an increasingly mobilised workforce, AIS wanted to give people better access to information in the field and build up a better database of sales and leads that was centralised and complete.

Solution Sage CRM ticked the crucial box for mobile efficiency while providing a central database of customer information that would better serve sales as well as engineering support services. Results Not only has Sage CRM contributed to a growth in sales, it has improved overall operational efficiency and brought the business much closer to customers and prospects.

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‘We knew from using Sage 50 that Sage support and customer service was always there and the sales team were immediately enthusiastic about Sage CRM.’ Wayne Fenlon Sales Manager AIS

A central database for all client information, the sales team can simply click into the system to see what’s going on with a customer, for example if a service is scheduled or repairs are required. The Sage CRM Builder feature has also proved valuable and is used to support the company’s equipment loans business, tracking assets that had previously been something of a black hole. Ticking all the right boxes AIS has grown by 30 per cent in the last year, something that wouldn’t have been achieved without Sage CRM, according to Wayne Fenlon. He puts it down to better visibility of the business and greater efficiency. Before Sage CRM, sales people would return to the office after an appointment to input customer updates at a desktop PC. Now they can do it in the field with a laptop, recording client notes after a meeting before moving on to the next. “We are much more up to date with sales and can generate comprehensive reports in 30 seconds,” he said. “That means I don’t have to sit down on Sunday evening, consolidating information for the Monday morning meetings.” Although it’s primarily been used to streamline the sales process, engineers also use it for calendar scheduling, creating a single source of maintenance appointments that is visible to all the business. “It’s grown to the point that we use it for all core processes and we’re significantly reducing paper consumption,” said Fenlon. Not just about generating new sales pipelines, it’s also used for revisiting forgotten leads and missed up opportunities. “We now have a historical database which means we can go back and look at sales we didn’t convert and try them again. Before, we wouldn’t have kept that kind of information,” said Fenlon.

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He said the new database is a massive improvement over what the company had before. Stripped back and cleansed, it contains over 2,000 customers and around 10,000 prospects, an up-to-date historical record of all the contacts that have been built up over the past decade. Fenlon attributes a couple of major project wins to being able to track the entire customer engagement process in a way that would have been unimaginable with Excel spreadsheets. “There are no worries about leads falling through the cracks and not being converted,” he said. “For small companies it’s important to gather information, but it can be hard to keep information.” Look to the future Going forward, the plan is develop further workflows, taking new customers from a sale all the way through to project management as the product is purchased, deployed and implemented. Summing up, Sage CRM has taken AIS to another level and proved to be a perfect fit as the business looks to develop. “It has given us a much more fluid way of seeing what’s happening with our customers by monitoring and tracking the course of our relationship. We have a much better handle of operations while always keeping the customer at the forefront,” he said.

About Sage CRM Over 15,000 small and medium sized companies across the globe use Sage CRM every day to accelerate sales, drive business productivity and make every customer interaction count. It is used by enterprising, growing companies seeking new ways to interact with customers, leverage the power of social media and take advantage of the latest mobile developments to further grow their business. When combined with Sage ERP, our customers enjoy better business insight, increased efficiencies and productivity, and gain a single, customer-centric view across their entire business. So whether you’re just starting out or have already grown to several hundred employees, Sage CRM can help accelerate your business success. Accelerate your business success with a free 30-day trial at www.sagecrm.com

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