Last Updated on May 15, 2023 Sarah Gayda
“Colligo gave our company and our sales team what they each wanted – drag and drop ease of saving emails and better utilization of SharePoint. Now sales reps just save to SharePoint from their inboxes and add metadata for faster search.”
IT Solution Architect
For businesses selling equipment or materials for large global projects, winning sales depends on completely capturing customers’ complex needs and specifications. Missteps in understanding the specific needs of a buyer can cost the entire sale.
For a global supplier of equipment solutions for the oil, gas, petrochemical, power and process industries, competing for and winning new business demanded a skilled and responsive sales effort. Historically, the sales team captured emails about customers’ evolving needs into Outlook public folders. Sales reps could all access the shared folders to hunt for information.
But watching the public folders grow, and search speed slow, the global equipment supplier recognized the need to draw upon Microsoft’s more progressive content services capabilities to save and share emails across their sales team. The company needed to find a new method of email management that gave the same save-and-share-from-Outlook convenience with new search effectiveness and on a sound knowledge management infrastructure.
Summary
Challenge:
- Storing email in Outlook public folders was not a long-term solution with Microsoft phasing out support.
- Searching public folders in Outlook was not fast enough to support sales team efficiency.
- The company sought to put in place a knowledge capture and email management approach that better utilized Microsoft modern capabilities.
Solution
- Enabled faster search of complete sales information captured by email and in attachments utilizing SharePoint and useful classification and metadata.
- Left in place existing sales team behaviour of saving emails and attachments from Outlook by bringing SharePoint access into Outlook.
Results
- Faster search helps the sales team more rapidly find information to support timely proposals, quickly respond to evolving customer requests, and efficiently close sales.
- Customer knowledge is completely captured and protected in a modern way that best utilizes the company’s investment in SharePoint infrastructure.
