Vorne helps manufacturers optimize plant operations using data-based insights. The company uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales to do the same with its sales and marketing operations. With these integrated sales and marketing tools, Vorne has been able to double the number of leads that move to product trial, double sales efficiency and throughput, improve lead nurturing, and personalize each customer’s buying journey.
“Using Dynamics 365 Marketing, we’ve been able to identify and precisely target communications at the bottlenecks, which has helped us double the number of leads that move to product trial.”
Large manufacturing plants are highly complex operations. There are thousands of moving pieces, possibly tens of thousands of human actions happening at once, and constantly shifting customer demands. Figuring out how and where to tighten operations is incredibly difficult.
Vorne makes technology that shines a light into manufacturing complexity by analyzing real-time data and spotlighting precisely where problems lie. Its equipment helps manufacturers determine overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), compare shift productivity, analyze part runs and downtime, and gain many other key insights.
The company searched for a tool that could give it similar clarity into its winding sales processes. “We have a long sales cycle, often more than a year, and leads were getting stuck at different stages,” says Adrian Pask, Vice President of Marketing at Vorne. The company encourages prospects to try its product for 90 days and, if they buy it, customers often roll it out plant by plant.
Vorne used an older customer relationship management (CRM) system that limited the company’s ability to craft personalized messages throughout the buying, trial, and deployment phases. And its lead data was spread across documents, spreadsheets, applications, and departments.
“Fifteen years ago, our sales process was a competitive advantage,” says Ramon Vorne, Chief Executive Officer at Vorne. “By 2017, we realized it had become a competitive disadvantage and a growth blocker.”
“With Dynamics 365 Marketing, it’s easy to treat people as individuals and craft highly targeted messages that support a very personal buying journey.”
Vorne and Pask looked at using Salesforce.com to manage their sales funnel and at several leading marketing automation systems for marketing activities. They felt it was a tremendous disadvantage to handle these closely aligned functions using two different products.
“No other product we looked at seamlessly integrates marketing and sales like Microsoft Dynamics 365,” Vorne says. “Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing are incredibly powerful applications and a huge competitive advantage for us.”
Today, prospects complete embedded marketing forms on Vorne web pages that automatically generate sales opportunities. Dynamics 365 Marketing tracks prospects’ digital behavior to create a lead score that also qualifies them for sales attention. It then sends automated communications that exactly match the message to the customer context based on defined customer journeys and with optimized business processes. It also creates phone activities and provides other insights for sales people in response to the leads’ digital behavior so that sales people can use Dynamics 365 Sales to advance those leads along the buyer’s journey.
For the buyer, Dynamics 365 Marketing provides a more attentive, personalized experience. Vorne sales people love the ability to create customer journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing. These are defined digital pathways that marketers set up to guide leads through a specific process, such as learning more about a product or onboarding trial customers by using automated messaging at specific decision points. “With other marketing automation tools, we were only able to blast generic emails to prospects,” Pask says. “With Dynamics 365 Marketing, it’s easy to treat people as individuals and craft highly targeted messages that support a very personal buying journey.”
Leads no longer languish at various stages of their Vorne buying journey. Recently, a prospect completed a web form, and the notification instantly landed in Pask’s inbox. He called the individual right away. “I got to surprise the contact, who told me he hadn’t expected any response at all and was thrilled to be talking to us within minutes,” Pask says.
Double leads that move to trial
The upshot of this new speedy response? “Using Dynamics 365 Marketing, we’ve been able to identify and precisely target communications at the bottlenecks, which has helped us double the number of leads that move to product trial,” Pask says. “In just the last week, we have smashed both our weekly and all-time product trial records.”
For the first time, the company has real-time lead tracking and a clear understanding of where it’s losing leads. “We’ve discovered that we’re not losing leads because of product features or price but simply because we lose touch with people,” Vorne says. “These are things we can easily address through more frequent and targeted messaging.”
Later in 2019, Vorne will release the next generation of its product, one it expects will quintuple sales. “Dynamics 365 is critical to our ability to handle that increase—with it, we’re already on track to double our sales efficiency and throughput,” Vorne says.
