Engineered Sealing Systems
Supplier
Custom Contact Management and
Quotation System
Industry: Industrial Supplies
Focus: Collaboration, Information Management
As a world leader, this supplier of
sealing systems and associated products is committed to
providing superior service to customers and to be the
technological leader in the sealing industry. The company
strives to exceed customer expectations and surpass industry
standards. The company’s management, sales personnel and
customer service representatives are in contact with clients
and prospects on a daily basis. Each member of the sales team
may have various interactions with multiple contacts
associated with any given client. Activities such as tracking
contacts, sales calls, and producing quotes for potential
buyers are done on an individual basis by each member of the
team.
The company was without a standard, streamlined method of
tracking the thousands of contacts and associated sales quotes
in a centralized data store. As quotations were produced, they
were forwarded to client personnel with follow up by the
individual sales team member. Because quotes were performed on
an individual basis using paper processes only, there was no
consolidation of sales quotes for the organization. The
company did not know the quantity or potential value of the
outstanding sales quotes. Therefore, reliable sales
forecasting on the outstanding pipeline of quotes was nearly
impossible. Also, the process in place was susceptible to
missing customer interactions or other valuable pieces of
information. Given the considerable size of the opportunities
John Crane pursues, it is critical they have a highly
effective process that positions them to win each opportunity.
Recognizing this as a serious issue in the business
development process, the company set out to find a way to
consolidate and streamline the sales quoting process. The
company called upon Genisys, a Microsoft Gold Certified
Partner Program for Collaborative Solutions, to make the
entire sales process more efficient, collaborative and
accurate.
Genisys worked with the company to develop a more thorough
understanding of their sales process, and defined the business
requirements and functional specifications for a solution.
Genisys determined that a contact management and quotation
system based on Microsoft Exchange and Outlook would best
address their business problem. The system would collect
accurate information about prospective opportunities and
provide authorized personnel real-time access to the latest
opportunity information, including customer and quote
information. Genisys used Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)
to automate the generation of custom quotation documents based
on a Microsoft Excel template using information from a custom
Outlook form. This automated process assures the use of
current and accurate information, and provides a consistent
look and feel to quotation documents. Due to the volume of
information generated by the system, data is pulled down from
Microsoft Exchange to an Oracle database to maintain a
consistent database of contacts, sales quote documents and
orders. This allows for group reporting of this information
from the company’s intranet.
The custom contact management and quotation system,
available to the company’s 150 sales representatives, assures
the sales process is more efficient, collaborative and
accurate than before. It provides users with real-time access
to the opportunity information leading to more accurate sales
forecasting, business development reporting, as well as a more
streamlined and consolidated sales quotation process.
Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft IIS,
Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Outlook 2000, Microsoft Office
2000, VBScript, Oracle
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