Case Study
Global Equipment Supplier
Global equipment supplier uses Colligo Email Manager to inform responsive sales outreach
For businesses selling equipment or materials for large global projects, winning sales depends on completely capturing customers’ complex needs and specifications, including the dozens or hundreds of discovery conversations that lead to the initial sales proposal, and through to the final purchase agreement. Missteps in understanding the specific needs of a buyer can cost the entire sale.
For a global supplier of equipment, winning new business demanded a skilled and responsive sales effort combined with highly efficient email management and SharePoint usage. Over the lifecycle of every buyer relationship, purchase requirements were captured across many email conversations by different employees of the manufacturer. Historically, the sales team saved emails about customers’ evolving needs into Outlook public folders. Watching the public folders grow, and search speed slow, the company recognized the need for a more progressive approach to save and share emails across their sales team. This case study is an account of how Colligo Email Manager enabled sales teams to continue to work in Outlook but save and classify critical knowledge to SharePoint without any extra effort.
Results
Faster search
Sales team can more rapidly find information to support timely proposals, quickly respond to evolving customer requests, and efficiently close sales.
Improved SharePoint Adoption
Leaving in place existing sales team behaviour of saving emails and attachments from Outlook enabled better usage of SharePoint.
Company knowledge protected
Customer and contract knowledge captured and protected as employees shift roles or depart.
Challenge
While the global equipment supplier had SharePoint in place prior to implementing Colligo for email management, their sales team was not using it, preferring to save emails and attachments to public shared folders in Outlook. The sales team saw saving emails to SharePoint as too time consuming and inconvenient when their day-to-day work was focused on managing emails within Outlook.
The company had set a goal to better utilize SharePoint to store knowledge for cross-team and cross-division collaboration. The IT team was challenged to find a way to make using SharePoint more convenient for the sales team and overcome the current challenges:
Emails not tagged, hard to find searching through public folders. With hundreds of sales conversations being captured as emails in public folders over months or years, Outlook search struggled to uncover critical information without metadata in place. Over a sales cycle, sales reps could spend hours mining for critical project knowledge, with the risk that valuable sales bid details could be overlooked.
Public folders grew large, difficult to manage. Not only was searching difficult in ever-growing public folders, the IT effort needed to support extremely large public folders was demanding and costly.
SharePoint capabilities weren’t being fully utilized. With SharePoint in use mainly by the Operations team, the global equipment manufacturer recognized that it wasn’t effectively drawing upon SharePoint’s capabilities to efficiently capture and classify content for collaboration.
Solution
The company needed to better draw upon SharePoint’s capabilities to collect content and make it easy to search for and share, all while ensuring security, scalability and a pathway to information compliance. The sales team wanted to continue to work as they were in Outlook. The IT team needed to find a way to bring the two worlds together and began evaluation email management solutions to meet their core needs:
Keep email capture familiar. By integrating SharePoint folder access directly into Outlook using Colligo Email Manager, the sales team could continue to work as it did, dragging and dropping emails and directly to SharePoint from their Outlook inboxes. In just a couple of clicks, sales reps can save site proposals, pricing information and draft contracts to the relevant library in SharePoint, with Colligo automatically storing key fields like subject, sender and date as metadata.
Faster search and sharing capabilities. Anyone on the sales team can now rapidly search for, find and share secure links to essential sales information as emails and attachments are captured and tagged with useful metadata. Faster, certain discovery of sales information, helps the sales team put forward the most competitive and customer-relevant sales proposals, in the fastest time possible.
Scalable and secure knowledge management. With sales team knowledge now being captured and classified in SharePoint, the global equipment supplier now has multiple departments finding benefit from easier-to-find information in SharePoint. As its users shift, the company is capturing more content into SharePoint, gaining more benefit from the scalable and secure knowledge management platform.
Colligo has now been in use for two years by the company’s sales team, streamlining the capture of emails, attachments and documents into SharePoint. Providing drag and drop Outlook email management integrated into SharePoint provides the sales team with the information access and speed they require to best compete in the globally-competitive equipment marketplace, while putting the company on a modern, secure and scalable knowledge management footing.
How Colligo helped a global equipment supplier better mine emails for responsive sales outreach
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