Lead2Growth
Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The way that a field sales team utilizes a CRM is entirely different from an inside sales team’s perspective. It is not uncommon for inside salespeople to use many different applications, with several applications offering similar functionality, and this often leads to technical debt.

In many instances, organizations will provide field sales teams with the same technology stack being used by inside sales. However, field sales struggles to properly adapt to these solutions because they are on the road and they have constraints that inside salespeople do not have to worry about such as bad internet connectivity, working from a phone, smaller laptop, and the like.

Many managers and senior-level staff are not provided with in-depth CRM training, and as a result, they struggle to conceptualize ways to better leverage CRM to help their salespeople sell more and be more productive.

Ohio-based Lead2Growth brings a different perspective to implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 that helps sales teams sell more and better manage their territory. Lead2Growth assesses the technical needs of client organizations, defines enhanced system requirements to build customized platforms and meet existing and emerging needs, and provides post-implementation service and support. In an interview with CIO Applications magazine, Paul Stewart, Dynamics 365 Technical Lead, shares his insights and views on the evolution of the CRM and sheds light on how Lead2Growth helps clients overcome challenges in this space.

Please provide us with an overview of Lead2Growth, and what your prospective clients can expect from your company?

Lead2Growth is on a mission to help organizations implement an efficient and user-friendly CRM platform while capturing all of the necessary data sets to provide robust reporting capability. We are an IT consultancy that guides clients through the challenges of implementing a new CRM, partnering with Microsoft to reduce the learning curve, assisting in establishing a coaching cadence, and supporting organizations in deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365.

What are a few core pain points that your clients face which Lead2Growth can effectively address?

Some companies already have CRMs in place, but they are frustrated with high expenditure on CRMs that their salespeople are not even utilizing. In some cases, the business has outgrown the CRM that they initially ventured out with.

The revenue is good, but the CRM has not been able to keep up with that evolution and the newfound complexities of their current business process. So, there is a disconnect between where their businesses are versus their technologies in place. Also, there is a lack of integration between their CRM and other business applications.

The other bucket includes the firms that have started small and grown but never had a CRM in place, and they are exploring to get their first-ever implemented while being overwhelmed by the number of options present in the market. Sometimes, there are firms that have just begun their CRM journey and face the same immense volume of solution providers to choose from. Therefore, they are looking for the right partner to help them make sense of everything and work towards getting their processes in place in this new system.

Can you walk us through the process of providing an amicable solution that meets the clients’ needs?

Microsoft has done a tremendous job creating a business application ecosystem where you can tie everything together in a single-source platform. We have used Microsoft Power Apps, which can be directly tied together with the CRM system. This is the native integration where we have built mobile applications exclusively for field sales teams. We can completely control everything within the interface within the Power Apps, such as its looks, functions, operations, or communications. We have also built integrations with Google Maps so that once a salesperson reaches their destination, we can easily automatically track them within the app. There is no need to register activities, and we can check them in automatically. There will be a pop-up before heading towards the following route, which entails a note for the previous appointment. The salesperson can type in a quick note which gets registered directly in the system.

Within Google Maps, we can also populate along the route other customers that are in the database. The salesperson may visit if it is a high-value client or business where they can re-engage. We can utilize such rounding technology and intelligence to help the field sales team perform basic everyday tasks while optimizing territory management. As a field salesperson, the technology enables you to check along with your route prospective new clients, and just one sale a month per salesperson multiplied by their average deal size and number of reps can lead to a huge amount of revenue, all thanks to a simple feature within an application. Lead2Growth can accommodate the specific needs and requirements of the organizations that it collaborates with and can update or modify accordingly. But the general premise is that we make our clients more productive.

Could you share a client success story where your services helped them overcome the challenges they faced?

One of our clients in the construction space was hugely dependent on Excel, where they were essentially doing detailed pricing proposals for customers. They used to cut and paste different Excel templates into a proposal document where the formulas would compute the cost of the products. Their salespeople were cutting and pasting Excel formulas incorrectly, and they were losing out on tens of thousands of dollars. Lead2Growth created input sheets within the CRM system, which resembled the Excel that the salespeople were accustomed to using. They could either populate or depopulate the various templates by clicking a button, and the formulas were fixed on the sheets. We color-coded the inputs to make it evident to the salespeople what numbers they needed to put in and where. Once they completed the sheet, we provided a simple print PDF button to map everything over and print it out. It saved them tens of thousands of dollars just in inputs, broken formulas, or errors from the salespeople. Lead2Growth has also taken that template and customized it for other industries with a heavy dependency on Excel.