Alberici
Familiar Tools Help Sales Team Drive Adoption, Centralize Critical Sales Information.
Alberici is a general contractor based in St. Louis, Missouri, that generates U.S.$1.13 billion in revenue a year. Across 11 company divisions, sales staff managed customer and sales information on an individual level by using a combination of spreadsheets and e-mail, and then entering the data into a CRM system. To centralize this information and gain business insight, Alberici implemented Microsoft Dynamics® CRM. By enabling sales staff to record customer and associated sales information through the familiar Microsoft Office Outlook® interface, Alberici has driven adoption and more effectively captured and centralized key sales information. With the solution in place, the company has saved around 5,000 hours per year while gaining the insight into sales that it needs to operate competitively across the markets that it serves.
Business Needs
Based in St. Louis, Missouri, Alberici is a general contractor with annual revenue of U.S.$1.13 billion. The company has 400 administrative and project staff members, and a field labor workforce ranging from 500 to 3,000 employees. Eleven divisions focus on specific markets, such as green building, healthcare, and automotive.
To manage customer accounts and corresponding sales information across divisions, Alberici used a customer relationship management (CRM) system, but user adoption was poor. Sales staff, whom are primarily project managers and engineers, preferred to manage their customer contacts and related sales information in Microsoft® Office Outlook® and Microsoft Office Excel®, which were both available on their mobile devices. But because they could not easily transfer this information from these intuitive desktop applications into the CRM system, sales staff resorted to error-prone data reentry—often only minutes before a meeting to run a key report. When Alberici executives needed to create custom reports, they often lacked the skills required to build the queries or extract information from the system, meaning that the company had to reach out to its software vendor for costly consulting services.
“If the application doesn’t work, people tend to not use it, no matter what you do or how much you enforce it,” says Frank Kropiunik, CIO and Vice President of Support Services for Alberici. “Our CRM system was a package that no one liked or used, so we had no in-house experts. It just needed to go.”
Lacking access to centralized sales information and the ability to easily share customer data with their peers, sales staff became increasingly isolated. Individual sales people primarily served their own customer pools, and company executives, including vice presidents of market segments, lacked any real-time insight into customers and sales as a whole. Understanding trends and identifying new sales opportunities based on historical information was not feasible. Because Alberici typically manages a small number of high-grossing projects, every bit of insight into customers and sales is important. A lost opportunity for Alberici can mean tens of millions of dollars.
“We don’t track thousands and thousands of customers like some companies, but we do track hundreds of projects for under a thousand customers,” explains Kropiunik. “These projects can range from $20 million to $500 million in revenue, so it is very important that we understand every aspect of our customer relationships.”
To gain insight into customers and sales across divisions, Alberici needed to deploy a solution that captures and manages sales figures and customer histories across the company. To ensure that the sales force would embrace the new system, the solution would have to be easy to use and provide sales staff with functionality that they would use. The system would also have to enable executives to easily perform analysis and run both standard and ad-hoc reporting against companywide data.
Solution
Alberici considered a range of customer relationship management solutions, including Deltek Vision 5.0, GoldMine Premium 8.5, Saleforce.com, and Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 4.0. Supporting a sales staff that preferred to work in Office Outlook and Office Excel—and wanted to be able to do so while on the go—Kropiunik saw Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the natural choice. To implement the solution.
Says Kropiunik, “Many of the vendors that we met with spent most of the time talking about how they would integrate their solution with Office Outlook and our mobile devices. They talked about what information would come over, what information wouldn’t come over, and so on.”
Getting the Most Out of Interoperability
For Alberici, the solution meant that sales staff could work in the familiar interface of Office Outlook, export their sales information to Office Excel, and take advantage of Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile to pull in key information while in the sales field. Interoperability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with other Microsoft products and technologies also meant that Alberici could control costs by leveraging existing IT infrastructure. For example, the company was already using Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 to manage corporate data and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 as its corporate intranet and collaboration solution. Seamless integration between the database in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and these tools enable Alberici to get the most out of its investment. For instance, executives can now view reports from the solution in Office SharePoint Server 2007 portals and run reports with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.
Says Kropiunik, “If a salesperson is on a project selling a multimillion dollar change order to the owner of a company, he or she can go to a dashboard in Office SharePoint Server and quickly understand what is going on in the related market.”
The company uses SQL Server Reporting Services to run reports against data stored in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Says Brandi Baltz, Quality Services Director for Alberici, “We run all of our reports with SQL Server Reporting Services, so it is just a click of a button away. And, the reports are dynamic; when we select an account, it drives us back to Microsoft Dynamics CRM with the most up-to-date information. In the past, it was just last-minute information that was added to provide substance.”
Managing Sales Processes and Capturing Information
Taking advantage of the flexibility of the solution, Alberici had Microsoft Dynamics CRM tailored to align with the company’s sales processes. Custom forms and fields in Microsoft Dynamics CRM enable Alberici to capture detailed information while custom reports enable the company to extract the information that it needs. Because this functionality is available in Office Outlook, Alberici can maintain a 360-degree view into customers and sales at all times without requiring any additional effort or data entry on the part of salespeople.
Alberici also had build a custom workflow in Microsoft Dynamics CRM that tracks sales leads through the pipeline. After a salesperson records initial contact with a lead, the solution automatically sends a task to the appropriate employee’s Office Outlook task list noting to place a follow-up call with the client on a certain date.
“The sales team is using Microsoft Dynamics CRM to help them do their job,” says Kropiunik. “At the same time, they’re providing structured data from every customer interaction, but it’s so intuitive that they don’t even know it.”
Working to Understand Customers
The comprehensive and high-quality information that the solution captures has spurred Alberici to think about additional ways to optimize its business. Explains Kropiunik, “With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we’re not just collecting all our data up front on the preconstruction side of our business, but we are also collecting project data after we close a project. We can use the information for future proposals; for example, we can look up all hospitals of a certain size, find out who was the architect, who was the electrical contractor, and other information that we need for the qualification work that we do.”
Kropiunik notes that the company will also use this information to generate an invitation to bid. To do so, Alberici will notify subcontractors that a contract is up for bid by segmenting its database of over 10,000 subcontractors based on attributes, such as painters; electricians; landscaping; and area of expertise, such as helipads. Because this information is all available through Office Outlook, sending out this e-mail notification to these subcontractors only takes a few clicks.
Benefits
With Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the Alberici sales staff can work in the familiar interface of Office Outlook and Office Excel to capture and manage the customer and sales information that executives need for enhanced decision making. By using the solution, the company has been able to centralize key information across divisions without the hurdle of user adoption, helping Alberici optimize sales processes and gain much needed insight into its customer base.
Says Kropiunik, “Before Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we had all this information across spreadsheets and e-mail, and someone would actually have to enter it into our previous CRM system for reporting. Now, all of the information is centralized and automatically entered into the system. The people who use Microsoft Dynamics CRM find it easy to manipulate data, and we’re getting value from the system.”
Drive High User Adoption
With customer relationship management functionality within Office Outlook, Alberici sales staff work more effectively in a tool that they interact with every day. As a result, user adoption is widespread, application switching is limited, and training time is greatly reduced. Says Kropiunik, “Even for the people who aren’t in the system every day, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is easy to use. Even others who use the solution less frequently can quickly check a project status prior to a phone call or meeting.”
Following implementation, 30 administrative staff members quickly took to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Alberici plans to extend the solution to 100 engineers as well. Says Kropiunik, “More and more people are coming to me and saying, ‘Can you get me on Microsoft Dynamics CRM? I really need it.’ That’s when you know it has been a success—when people are seeing its benefits and success in other areas of the business and wanting to be on board to share in the wealth.”
Gain a Complete View of Customer Interactions
Alberici is now capturing the information needed to gain a 360-degree view of its customers. Whereas in the past, sales staff managed customers on an individual level, sales staff across divisions now have access to the same information, which supports collaboration and enhanced decision making. Says Baltz, “Now that we have a single source of data, the markets can work together in collaboration with specific clients. Our internal business units can actually cross-market and upsell to the client. Prior to Microsoft Dynamics CRM our ability to identify cross-market opportunities was not easily recognized.”
Alberici is now able to more effectively perform historical trending analysis on customer information as well. For example, the company’s marketing department is actively tracking project pursuits to recognize successful proposal presentation strategies as well as underperforming initiatives before they become costly. In addition, the company is looking at areas of significant growth. For example, the company’s department in charge of the energy market is using Microsoft Dynamics CRM to capture customer demographics and perform market profiling to forecast construction needs and future market share with energy plants. Says Baltz, “We’re looking at the client and the relationship differently. We are not only looking at current clients, but also at potential clients. We are looking at trends in the past and ideas for construction for the future. This kind of data is an asset to Alberici.”
Save 5,000 Hours Per Year
When comparing the licensing and maintenance costs of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to the competitive products that Alberici considered, Baltz notes that Microsoft Dynamics CRM was only half the cost. And now with the solution in place, Alberici has realized savings in areas across the business. For example, Alberici has eliminated double entry for all contact and lead information that resulted in keying information from Office Outlook and Office Excel into its previous CRM system. The company estimates that this saves approximately five hours a week per employee in sales. An equal amount of time has been saved by using SQL Server Reporting Services to run real-time reports based on information from Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which are easily filtered and rendered for any criteria, such as pipeline and sales forecasts. Alberici estimates that these time savings total around 5,000 hours per year.