How does a global company connect its salespeople to customers in an efficient yet personal way? Rotterdam-based Broekman Logistics decided to add the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing app to the company’s existing Dynamics 365 Sales app to make it even easier and more efficient to find and develop high-quality leads and nurture customer relationships. As a result, Broekman Logistics not only increased its sales, but also gained valuable insights that it uses to sharpen sales management. The real engine behind global logistics? It’s all about a smooth collaboration between sales and marketing.
“We connected Dynamics 365 Marketing to our website and achieved a 180 percent ROI in less than a year.”
Broekman Logistics serves customers with complex needs. Operating in industrial markets, the global logistics company provides warehousing and distribution services for chemical companies, for example, along with logistics and assembly services for providers of large industrial equipment like wind turbines, excavators, and more. Broekman uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 intelligent business applications, recently adding Dynamics 365 Marketing to facilitate a major growth phase.
Meeting the marketing challenge
Historically, people have equated marketing with generating eye-catching brochures and other collateral. Rutger Bonsel, General Manager of Marketing at Broekman Logistics, begs to differ. “It’s not just organizing events or coordinating customer gifts,” he insists. “Marketing is the enabler that fills the sales funnel. And in the logistics industry, it’s an underdeveloped discipline.”
He notes the challenges facing a global logistics company: brand awareness, the pressure to maintain personal relationships while expanding the customer base, and intense competition in a growing field of providers. After all, there are few barriers to entry, says Bonsel. “You don’t need assets,” he explains. “Anyone with a device and phone service can become a freight forwarder.”
Of course, salespeople play a pivotal role in a company’s success. “But many salespeople are afraid of change and have to see the advantages,” observes Walter Sanda, CRM Project Manager at Broekman Logistics. As the keepers of intercompany relationships, salespeople traditionally have their own customer contact databases. And perennially pressed for time, they’re often reluctant to update company systems that don’t deliver a return on their time. Sanda wanted to offer the company’s salespeople a value proposition—increased opportunities for growth through lead nurturing, better understanding the customer journey, and bringing together rich information streams.
When Bonsel arrived at the company, he got it. “We had a very disciplined sales team,” he says, “along with a perfect system for storing data, but not for supporting salespeople. We wanted to give both our marketing and sales teams a solution they could use to generate more leads and follow up on them faster.”
Bonsel guided his marketing team to move away from the cumbersome manual practice of downloading contact data from the company’s customer relationship management (CRM) database to Excel and then to Outlook, which routinely triggered undelivered emails and frustration. “We had a lot of contact information but needed better, more integrated ways of using it,” says Bonsel. The company already managed its sales opportunities using Dynamics 365 Sales, so when Microsoft released Dynamics 365 Marketing, Broekman saw the chance to extend the Sales app’s value and boost the company’s number of qualified leads by using the apps together.
“Seeing the amount of new business generated through our website after adding the Marketing app was a big eye opener, especially in our quite conservative industry. It explicitly shows the added value of the marketing department within the company.”
The company connected its website and Dynamics 365 Marketing so that prospect and customer visits to the website also contributed to CRM data. “We professionalized our marketing by adding the Marketing app and immediately began using it for managing customer events,” says Bonsel. “Automating email marketing campaigns makes life so much easier and more efficient for marketers and salespeople alike.”
Broekman employees found that they could be effective with the new solution right from the start. “With Dynamics 365, we’re providing our teams with a consistent user interface that’s familiar and easy to use,” says Sanda.
As a pilot test, Broekman launched an automated email campaign for an annual event, providing landing pages for subscription. “We nearly doubled our number of subscribers for that 2019 event versus the first year,” says Bonsel. “I really believe that the communications flow and customer tracking we achieved with Dynamics 365 Marketing contributed significantly to our increase in subscribers.”
For Bonsel, the results are a huge validation. “Lead generation is a hard target,” he says. “We connected Dynamics 365 Marketing to our website and achieved a 180 percent ROI in less than a year. Seeing the amount of new business generated through our website after adding the Marketing app was a big eye opener, especially in our quite conservative industry. It explicitly shows the added value of the marketing department within the company.”
As for the hard-working sales team, they’re won over by the power of data. For example, Broekman definitively settled a debate about whether to send salespeople to an event in the United States by analyzing data from previous years, including opportunities generated by that event and how much gross margin they’d produced. “Salespeople understand that the Dynamics 365 apps are actually there to help them. Beyond making more informed travel budget decisions, they’re now able to better nurture leads and engage customers based on campaign history—tracking things like who opened an email, clicked a link, and subscribed for an event—and those interaction insights,” explains Bonsel. “They see that the system works for them rather than vice versa.“
He and Sanda look forward to their next step: taking advantage of the Marketing and Sales apps’ integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and LinkedIn lead-generation forms to save more time and help expand sales. “We’ve already benefitted from having all this functionality on one platform,” says Bonsel. “And there are big opportunities still ahead of us with Dynamics 365.”
