© freelance tekstforfatter Christian Nevado headline: Getting The Big Picture HOW THE INVENSYS CRM SALES PLUS SOLUTION INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY FOR IDAB WAMAC Background Idab Wamac is a leading Swedish supplier of material handling equipment for the newspaper printing industry. The company offers a full range of mailroom equipment and systems world-wide, handling about 100 different projects simultaneously. The sales process is relatively long, stretching from 1 month to 5 years depending on the complexity of the system chosen by the customer.       The many ongoing projects and the long sales processes require the continuous gathering and updating of a large amount of data. This work constituted a resource problem. Another problem was that the sales force had no easy access to the data. Page 2 top: IDAB WAMAC IS THE FIRST COMPANY IN SWEDEN TO IMPLEMENT THE INVENSYS CRM SALES PLUS SOLUTION: "IT COULD OFFER MORE FOR THE HANDLING OF LONG PROJECTS THAN ANY OF THE CRM SYSTEMS WE HAD SEEN BEFORE." body copy: The Challenge Anna-Karin Jönsson, marketing and sales coordinator at Idab Wamac, explains the challenge: "Until late in the year 2000, we used Microsoft Excel for our sales opportunity handling. This solution had a number of drawbacks. One was the need for frequent, time-consuming manual updates, which I had to do myself. Another was the inability of the system to centralize information, which remained in the heads of the sales people. This made our opportunity handling too vulnerable to human errors, sick days, job changes and so on."       Realizing the need for a completely new company solution, Idab Wamac contacted several suppliers before reaching Baan Nordic (now Invensys CRM) in Stockholm. During a 3-day workshop, Invensys CRM and Idab Wamac worked through a typical opportunity together to see what possibilities the Sales Plus solution could offer.       "The Sales Plus solution could offer more for the handling of long term projects than any of the CRM systems we had seen before," Anna-Karin Jönsson explains. The Solution "With the Sales Plus solution, we now have a centralized knowledge database for company addresses, contact persons and all other important data," says Anna-Karin Jönsson. "Easy to find and easy to update. Now the area sales managers can update their opportunities themselves. At the same time, we get a history record that we did not have before. The Sales Plus solution also features a function called 'Big Picture' which is a great help to us in getting an overview of a company and its products and relations to other companies. This makes it easier to decide how many resources we should spend on each opportunity. In addition, The "Sales Funnel" function gives a breakdown of the sales process. This increases its predictability and gives visibility to the effectiveness of the salesforce.       With the Sales Plus solution, it is also possible for us to work on an external database and synchronize with our central database. This is very useful, especially for the sales people who are out of the office most of the time. They can update their record wherever they are when they have the time.      In short, all the parts of the Sales Plus solution we use work rather well. There are even functions in the system, like Forecasting and Task Handling, which we haven't begun to use yet. But we will," Anna-Karin Jönsson promises. Invensys CRM's Sales Plus solution for Idab Wamac has: *     Collected all information in one knowledge base for building customer relations *     Facilitated sales information updates *     Given users easy access to all relevant data at any time and any place *     Offered a comprehensive, continuously updated overview of the market situation *     Increased the number of correct orders *     Reduced the need for training. As a result of the Invensys CRM and Idab Wamac partnership, the process of accessing and updating sales and opportunity information has become much easier. This has increased the company's productivity and enhanced the efficiency, especially among the sales people. bottom: IDAB WAMAC USES THE INVENSYS CRM SALES PLUS SOLUTION AS A CENTRALIZED KNOWLEDGE DATABASE, MAKING UPDATED CLIENT INFORMATION IMMEDIATELY AND EASILY AVAILABLE TO THE SALES FORCE.