Canada’s Fastest Growing Company: Salesforce vs. Dynamics CRM

Recently, we hosted a webinar with FourQuest Energy and went over the first stages of their experience moving from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  The recording is below; enjoy!

What follows is a transcript of the webinar.  It may not be 100% accurate.  

Joe:

Really happy to be here today and talk about FourQuest and their story, rolling out Dynamics CRM. FourQuest is a pretty amazing company. I’m going to spend a few minutes chatting about how they’ve come so far and what they do. As an energy services company, what they do for their customers is really help them ensure safe plant startup and shutdown programs, as well as efficient maintenance. As you can imagine these are very, very significant processes that require a high degree of specialized skills and engineering.  Very, very specialized; FourQuest really focuses on the detail and engineer the solutions to meet their customer’s specific requirements. They’re a very specialized firm and dealing with very high risk activities require many engineers that work with the customers on sight to ensure they have the right solutions. When you consider maintenance, there are many ways to clean the pipes and depends on many different factors – what chemicals are used and brace of tactics. Obviously the customer needs to medicate the risk as much as possible. When they’re building new constructs or refinery that they need to ensure that there are no issues and piping requires a lot of high degree of casting, pressure testing and filtration. The point is their solutions are very client specific and require engineers to work with the clients to define their specific requirement. FourQuest really wants to remove the guess work from their customers, ensure that they deliver the right solution.

Given FourQuest’s growth trajectory, ever growing change to accommodate growth brought a number of challenges. Although FourQuest has always viewed IT as a strategic part of the business and a critical supporting role for their processes, as much as the business is evolving, their IT systems needed to as well. As FourQuest grew, they were adding more services based on customer demands. They were growing as customers were asking for them to deliver on more services. Their systems needed to change and adopt really, really quickly. In many cases, their existing technology that they were currently supporting could not keep up with their growth. Agility and flexibility and user adoption became such a key factor to evaluating what solutions were going to be used going forward. Since our discussion today is really focused on CRM, that’s where I’m going to highlight some of FourQuest’s challenges with their previous solution, which is SalesForce.com and why they needed to switch and switch really quickly. It was a really rapid migration. One of the most notable point in going back to existing technology not being able to keep up, FourQuest CRM Solution SalesForce was difficult for Mark’s team to add changes and enhance its capabilities. It became very evident that it was going to be more costly and time consuming that expected. The factor for change and the more rapid time to value was very, very important to not only IT but also the business.

There are also a number of additional challenges that not only led to limited support for the business, but also continue to add unnecessary cost. User adoption was failing, support from the businesses as well. When the evaluation began looking for alternatives, Mark noted pretty quickly that the license cost were double the SalesForce and cost for enhancing SalesForce ended up being upwards of 3x more than Dynamics CRM. With the amount of savings, the return with doing a switch would be realized in less than a year and gave them so much more enablement.

There were also some really underestimated technical challenges that became more concerning and notable as time went on. Mark will address this a little bit later in some of his visioning statements but integration was definitely a huge one, and missing somewhat with SalesForce where FourQuest had a cloud strategy and a vision, rolled out Office 365, had document management requirements and sales wanted to have one application that they work through. Document management wasn’t out of the box with their previous solution, whereas Dynamics CRM seamlessly integrated to SharePoint and have that need of office integration right out of the box, integrating with link in other office applications. Admin processes for Mark and his team in the previous solution were also not very intuitive, whereas with the Dynamics interface, admin processes were very familiar and similar across all applications, on look and feel in operations.

In search for alternatives, Microsoft CRM became more and more notable as a natural fit for FourQuest. It actually really hit home when Mark and his team attended Microsoft’s Dynamics Convergence, which is Microsoft’s dynamics customer conference in March every year. Mark and his team attended many different sessions, met with many other customers and learned more about how CRM is architected and its ability to be quickly molded to the business, so going back to that being very agile and flexible as their business grew and their processes change. The migration to Dynamics CRM was extremely rapid and provided a fluid and easy to use experience for FourQuest. The ability to enhance and change a solution as FourQuest continues to grow is now a lot easier for them. Document management is integrated and the solution works right within their Outlook.

Dynamics CRM also helped clean up data for them, avoiding duplicate entries of contact, given that it is a part of Outlook and when they add a new contact, whether it be Outlook or their Smartphone that it’s completely integrated throughout and they’re not doing duplicate entry. So it provided a much less cluttered solution. It has since been enhanced, which a lot has been done in-house. Some of the configurations in fact were done in hours. Mark’s team really got ramped up in the solution quickly, given its easy to use and user adoption was extremely quick from an admin perspective as well.

FourQuest have since seen some great returns with lower cost, the rapid user adoption and the ability to modify the solution with minimal impact. I think a big thing, like many other organizations we see, is that complete tight integration with the Office Suite. I think that could definitely not be overlooked because people are used to using Outlook. They’re used to using the Office products and it was completely seamless for the users, which helped them dramatically from a changed management perspective. Training was very, very minimal and people were ramped up using the solution very quickly.

I’ve just mentioned that integrated solution was very significant to the overall success of the solution. Definitely less management from an IT perspective and cost and provides the team, the sales team with a one-stop shop to get all their information, not having to go to multiple applications. It’s also been much easier for Mark and his team to manage, add new users, train quickly, and not feel overwhelmed by difficult and costly changes as their business grows.

At this point, I’d like to pass the mic over to Mark for a few minutes, just to talk about his vision for what’s next with FourQuest from an IT perspective and going forward and helping enable the business with CRM. Thanks Mark.

Mark:

I think I’ll just echo a lot of what Joe has said there. CRM has been a fantastic tool, not just for sales but for other operations within our business. You got to understand what we have found to our surprise is CRM is actually a platform. But it actually can do a lot more. That’s where the future of CRM sits with us. We’re going to be launching new recruitment engines and we’re going to expand that into CRM, as far as fleet management and even marketing. It’s just a fascinating tool of how much it can actually spread across your organization and where you can use it for. I find that the great marketplace out there for customizations for CRM makes that done a great job of putting a storefront to your engine when you’re looking for this kind of thing. But also what I found is if you want to build your own custom application, that’s not difficult to do either. Microsoft gives you the support with their partners to build what you really think you need for your company. You can get CRM to do whatever you want, and that’s what’s happening for us. Really it ties in with our whole strategy, our whole Microsoft strategy, which when we first started going cloud-base technology, we obviously got on the Microsoft bandwagon with their office 365 application. What made sense with CRM is the integration points and with SharePoint and link and all the other Office Microsoft applications. We didn’t really have that before with our previous CRM, we didn’t really have that integration. Moving forward, going further into Microsoft is definitely where we’re heading and trying to get more and more out of CRM as time goes on.

Carlos:

Great. Thank you for your comments there, Mark. We’re going to open it now for Q & A. We have a few more slides but I encourage the people in the line that want to ask Mark with a question about his experience with implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM and how he chose this technology platform to submit them now. We’ll be monitoring them and then we’ll relay them back to Mark in a few minutes here. You can go ahead and just submit those on your webinar.

Joe:

Thanks a lot, Mark. That was great and some great points there. It is really exciting and we often see how organizations, when they get a little taste of Dynamics CRM all of a sudden they’re like kids in a candy store. They figure out “wow! We can really do this with it. We can do that with it.” We’ve seen, I guess that term rapid application development, I guess leveraging Dynamics CRM also as a platform. More often than not now, a lot of organizations leveraging for stakeholder management, property management, health and safety, a lot of different applications, the way you can take it and mold it. It’s flexibility and agility and how it’s architected; it allows you to easily do that. Rather than going and custom developing something that meets your business specifically, you already have a solution that’s architected, that has your security model all built in, that has your workflow engine all built in. So you’re already so far ahead of the gate and a user interface that is really second to none.

I want to talk quickly, while folks are entering their questions, there’s actually some promotions on right now but I wanted to talk about sort of where the sales productivity promotion delivers unmatched value. This is a quick comparison chart to show you the detail between Dynamic CRM and SalesForce. There’s nothing I’m trying to hide here. This is a reality. We’re able to deliver way more capability and experience for a fraction of the cost. Depending on your user count, the savings can be really significant. And we’ve seen where organizations have licensed in the hundreds of users and have been able to add more headcount because the savings had been that significant. When you look at all the different capabilities in addition to compare apples to apples, the dollar amount is really significant. We’re seeing organizations who are already using an existing platform like SalesForce scratching their head going “maybe I’m not married to it. Maybe I can save $80,000 or $100,000 a year based on the user count, which allows me to add more resources and do more with the business. It’s a pretty exciting time. The other great thing is the way the licensing is structured, it’s role based. The conversations we’re seeing with organizations now, more often than not, is not who’s going to be using the system. It’s more of who’s not going to be using the system because the more folks that you have across your organization leveraging the CRM platform, the more value that you’re going to drive out of the technology across the business. Even if there are very limited users, such as read-only or just able to add, even a receptionist being able to add media request or activities for their executive, that’s your audit history. That’s your insurance, all tracked and managed. And really the way that Microsoft has rolled out the licensing has allowed us to do that, allowed organization to say “wow, I only need to spend $15 a month on this one user.” That makes sense. It gets everybody tied in and information being shared right across your organization.

The promotion that’s on right now is for less than an extra $3 per user, you actually get Office 365 and Power BI included. When you take that into consideration, getting your Office 365 Enterprise E3 and Power BI, you’re getting so much capability at adding a lot more value across the business for a fraction of the cost of SalesForce, not even close to the competition. We’re really excited about those promotion and it’s been seeing a lot of traction in the marketplace.

Carlos:

If there’s anyone on the line that’s interested in this sales productivity bundle, it is a limited time promotion. You can contact us for a free trial of the CRM Sales Productivity package that you ought to experience that. The probably easiest way to get a hold of us is either email us at encore@encorebusiness.com or contact us directly at the number that you see there.

At this point, I am going to bring it into Q & A, and I do have some questions that have come through for you, Mark. I’ll start with one here, asking about customizations in CRM. They’re asking, for you who have customized with CRM, have you experienced an upgrade in the software? If any work, and what work was required to update the customization? How difficult do you see that? I’ll let you answer that.

Mark:

Good question actually. There are controls in place Microsoft put on their ISP, which ensures that anything, any updates that happen in your customization includes controls in manner you’re not going to lose or disrupt any of your software, any customization I should say. What we tend to do is we have a test environment and it’s where updating an ISP or a customization, we’ll be doing that in the test section or the sandbox as we call it, to make sure that it works and that gives you to keep the name. At the top of my head, I haven’t had a problem where we have to do any work regarding our customizations and talking about a larger customization change.

Carlos:

Great, thanks Mark. In regards to another question here that’s asking about a lot of people might have experienced SalesForce in the past and you like to lean towards what you’re familiar with. People are leaning toward SalesForce. Any advice that you would give someone that is getting pressure from other people to go that direction?

Mark:

Yeah, you got to think what’s right for your company. Again, with all the integration points, if you’re a Microsoft type and you’re an Office 365 as well, there’s a lot of touch points your CRM meets, with your email, your SharePoint, your collaboration platform, whatever you run. And you’ll find that it’s going to be a lot easier using the Microsoft platform. It just makes it more seamless. That would be how I would call that out.

Carlos:

Right. I guess along those lines, what type of customizations have you been able to accomplish with Microsoft Dynamics? I understand that when it was implemented there were some things that you did have to alter or change just to get your business.

Mark:

Yes, we actually have to make some heavy customizations to our sales platform because I had a box that really wasn’t what the guys wanted to use. The sales guys have their own way of that versus the information they need. We made some heavy customization on the CRM and actually almost half of that we’ve done in house and half of that was done with Encore support and I would say it was pretty straightforward to do and again we didn’t have any issues with the customization. What was great is we got feedback straight away from our staff and we were able to make them changes on the spot if it was an easy fix.

Joe:

I think Mark, just to add to that, years ago when the technology wasn’t where it’s at today, customization was a scary word. And I think Dynamics CRM in a way it’s architected, it loves to be molded to your business and it’s really simple and easy to do and can be easy to upgrade afterwards. To do simple, even complex changes in the system, you can add tables, add new entities, add fields, have filed-level security and everything is kind of all built in within its configuration toolkit. It lets you do so much without having to write code, right Mark? Would you say that’s fair?

Mark:

Absolutely, yes. It gives it more natural interface for making any change. You don’t need an IT degree to work out or to do your customizations. They’re pretty straightforward. They’re well controlled but pretty straightforward to do. And that’s what I like about that. That gives me the sense of confidence and move on to these other customizations, with the larger customizations like with our HRM and our fleet management and marketing, gives you that confidence that wow, that’s a big change, that’s a big thing to put in but whenever something small happens, we have to make small change, I can have that small customization to do like changing a name in a button or changing a slight workflow, you can do that yourself within a handful of minutes.

Carlos:

Right. Just a general comment here, we’re getting a lot request for the slides and some people specifically requested the SalesForce and Dynamics CRM chart to be presented again. I’ll provide information at the end of the session how you can get the whole slide deck and how you can email us and we can provide any of the information that was presented today. Just stay tune to that and then we’ll get you the slides that you’re looking for. What other questions that came up here, Mark, and I think you’ve experienced quite a growth from being probably somewhat of a smaller company to a larger company now. One of the questions here is that for a small company with let’s say less than 10 users, can CRM benefit them? They’re saying it’s a very niche market that they’re in. Can you speak to that for a second? Is this something that can scale down to that level?

Mark:

Actually it’s a yes because the way our business works and we have a lot of business divisions. One of our sectors that use CRM are actually 12 users. I actually think yes, it could be. What it brings is efficiency. If you are a new team, it’s a great way to collaborate, share information, track appointments and get that little bit more of a human touch so when you next speak to the client, you got all that information to your hand and if you’re covering someone else, you have their information as well so that you can be truly prepared for that next meeting.

Carlos:

Right, along those lines, someone’s asking here for examples that you implemented for outside sales people. Do you have anything you can comment on from a perspective of how CRM was implemented for the sales people?

Mark:

Well, are you asking me regarding the implementation, how we actually got the people on board?

Carlos:

More from a perspective of was there any type of customization or any specific tools that you found was especially helpful for them.

Mark:

Not from the top of my head. I don’t think there was anything that made it easier for them. The thing is with a bit of programming, the way our flow is very native to them. I think that’s something I’m going to touch on a few times. The flow of how things work in CRM, it’s very natural for someone who’s used an office application before, especially the integration with the Outlook plug-in. I think that would have been the biggest change for them because with our previous CRM we didn’t have an Outlook plug-in and that made a big difference because, I think Joe touched on this before, was the way that you could…that data you could make sure was accurate and you didn’t have an interpretation because you’re all sharing each other’s information through the Outlook connect and that just give them more natural flow to them in how they could use the system.

Carlos:

Right. Okay, I have one more question here, Mark. I know, who would have thought that you as an organization are making a lot of changes all the time. I think people on the line would probably want to hear what did you see as important, probably when you started out, for the organization from a technology platform perspective and what do you see important now after scaling the organization?

Mark:

I think when you start off; you try and get a lot for a little, right? I think it’s important to choose the right platform from the beginning and one that you know could work from your business needs to maintain. I think this holistic mythology will actually help you later on. I think the key is to see the bigger picture in the beginning and then find where you see the business is going. I know that’s hard to predict, but you can kind of get an idea of what you’re going to be using in a few years time. That’s true from the beginning or even right now. I mean right now I’m already strategizing where we’re going to expand CRM to in a few years time, but what’s the next step after CRM? You can kind of see where the business is going and where the technology needs can be applied. I think what’s important and what’s been a true success for myself is trying to make…I’m trying to find a system that is simple and elegant enough to use. It’s just a pick it up, yet be capable of all the business requirements from the start. This is very true for the Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics CRM, and the SharePoint. People are used to that. I think what’s also really important is that this application platform is hardware agnostic. You can use it on any piece of hardware that you have and that’s good for the guys in the field because you don’t need to think about the technology they’re using. They can use their Apple iPhones and basically use CRM, capability of someone that was on the surface. I think that kind of makes the technology transparent to the user and they can get exactly what they need, where they need it and go into that meeting, prepare with all the information and make themselves ahead of the competition. I think that’s the key right there.

Carlos:

Thank you very much, Mark. I want to thank you for all the time that you put in here and being to answer a lot of these questions that come as they came. A little bit about ourselves for those who are interested in contacting us. We’re Encore, as I mentioned before. We’re Microsoft’s most experienced Dynamics Partner. We implement CRM but on top of that we also implement Microsoft Dynamics AX, Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Microsoft Dynamics GP. We have 4 locations across Western Canada, two of them in BC and we have over 80 dedicated certified professional. Also, on top of thanking Mark, I thank Ron from Microsoft and also thank you Joe for sharing the story of how FourQuest came to where they are today. This is the end of the session but for those of you who are looking to contact us with questions, you can email us there at encore@encorebusiness.com. Or if you’re also looking for the slides, I know there were few requests around that, feel free just to email us there and in the subject line you can say ‘requesting slide for the webinar’ and we’ll attend to that. Again, thank you everyone for attending and enjoy the rest of your day.