Challenges

• Deploy a customer relationship management (CRM) system that would provide the organization’s many divisions with a 360-degree view of customer details, including contacts, product mixes, and sales prospects
• Provide a central online repository for account managers to store customer data, eliminating managing this information in multiple spreadsheets and other applications, as this made it more difficult to identify new opportunities and complete reports
• Enhance the company’s ability to identify opportunities to cross-sell products, such as tapes, adhesives, and films, to new and existing customers

Solutions

• Engaged Oracle Partner CRM IT (India) to deploy Oracle CRM On Demand to enable more than 500 sales and marketing staff to better manage existing customers and easily identify new business opportunities across the entire organization
• Enabled sales and marketing staff to easily record all contact with customers, identify and qualify leads, and progress these leads through various stages before sale
• Provided sales automation capabilities, such as the ability to standardize diverse sales and marketing processes, which will help the company improve customer service
• Enabled marketing staff to recognize which customers are buying what type of products, such as medical instruments, personal protection products, and adhesives and tapes, helping them to develop targeted campaigns that reach the correct customer segments
• Gained the ability to identify how many sales leads came to fruition, enabling sales staff across multiple divisions—such as medical, occupational health and environmental safety, and electronics—to share strategies to better manage accounts, with the added benefit of improving productivity
• Improved cash flow by removing the need to purchase hardware, software licenses, and employ IT maintenance staff to manage the CRM application
• Improved communication between sales and technical staff, which would soon enable salespeople to provide more accurate information about quality issues and product development activities
• Integrated with back-office systems, which enabled sales and marketing to gain immediate access to transaction data, such as product sales and orders, improving the service provided to customers
• Set to reduce the average time it takes to close sales cycles and help improve lead conversion rates

Why Oracle

3M India initially evaluated a range of customer relationship management systems that could be rolled out as a hosted solution or installed at the company’s premises.

“Following the evaluation, we felt that Oracle CRM On Demand would best suit our business objectives,” said Joshi. “The ability to reduce capital expenditure costs associated with purchasing and managing hardware while making use of an adaptable, on-demand solution was very attractive.”

Implementation Process

CRM IT held workshops with staff at 3M India to define requirements and design the system. Teams from both companies worked through 3M India’s main business pain points before deciding how the application would be designed and configured.

“CRM IT’s technical specialists were involved early in the engagement process and quickly understood the nuances of our different businesses, which is critical for a successful companywide implementation,” said Joshi.

“They helped load our existing customer data into Oracle CRM On Demand, and ensured the application was integrated with some of our backend systems, which provided continuity for our business data.”

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