CRM upgrade crushes legacy system

12.07.2006
Enduring six years of an archaic customer relations system (CRM) forced Sirromet Wines in Australia to seek an automated solution.

The sluggish, manual CRM system wasted time and blocked customer information sharing between the winery's sales, distributions, and marketing teams.

Sirromet Wines IT manager, Ian Parker, said as a client database did not exist, customer information did not travel between mobile sales staff or departments. He said company executives could not gauge market trends as a result.

"As the company grew, we knew we needed to capture important sales information that was in the salespeople's heads, that could otherwise be lost if staff left or changed territory," Parker said. "This valuable information needed to be secured and centralized."

Sirromet will also revamp its ordering process in which sales staff placed 20 minute phone orders and prepared monthly hardcopy sales reports.

"We needed a method to get sales staff to order in such a way that we could centrally record and manage each deal, but also such that they were freed up to spend more of their time reaching customers," Parker said.