Microsoft Dynamics beats SF.com to another CRM deal

Redback is a company headquartered in Sydney which delivered teleconferencing, web conferencing, videoconferencing and webcasting solutions to Australian companies.

The company lists organisations such as the College of Law and the Royal College of Pathologists on its website as customers.

In a statement published this week, Microsoft said that the company had grown by a rate of 1,400 per cent over the past three years and was forecasting to hire an additional 30 to 40 people over the next two years, as its business continues to grow.

Previously, Redback's sales team had been using Microsoft's Outlook platform to track their prospects and clients. "However, this system became problematic as each department had different records of calls and requests from the same clients," Microsoft's statement said. "With no central repository for information it was impossible to share information or actions across the business and no actual customer relationship process existed."

"We realised that we were creating all these campaigns and generating leads but had to track this manually in spreadsheets," Sara Gonzalez, Redback Conferencing's marketing manager said.  

"This process became time consuming with information getting lost and becoming less of a priority which resulted in the company not being able to measure the return on investment."

Because of this, the company started looking for a CRM platform to centralise its data, eventually looking in detail at Microsoft's Dynamics CRM Online and Salesforce.com. Eventually it settled on the Microsoft option, with implementation assistance from partner Markinson.

"We chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for the Outlook integration, familiarity and ability to customise the platform – it does everything we need and we know that the system will grow with us," Gonzalez said.

"We did review Salesforce.com but we didn't see the need for all the additional services. In the end, it was our comfort in Microsoft, familiarity with Outlook and the value Markinson brought that led us to choose Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online."

Now, whenever Redback runs a marketing campaign, usually generating between 50 and 150 leads, the leads are submitted into the new CR platform, which automatically deletes duplicates and generates a customised lead form. This is then fed into the sales process.

"The beauty of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is that, without the need for an infrastructure build, Markinson was able to quickly deploy a relationship management solution that has the capability to grow and change with the Redback Conferencing business," Ian Whiting, CEO, Markinson said.

Another productivity benefit, according to the company, is the customisable dashboards allowing sales reps to measure sales leads and track and compile information for existing and potential new customers.

"We've grown quickly and the Dynamics CRM system does all the tracking and measuring for us," Gonzalez said.

Opinion

Salesforce.com does not currently appear to be having a great time in Australia. I am now receiving a regular stream of notifications from Microsoft telling me that the company's Dynamics CRM platform is beating Salesforce.com to customer after customer.

And it's not just Microsoft. We've also seen a slew of major Australian companies signing up to Oracle's cloud CRM package, and even Australian vendor Technology One is signing up Australian customers for its own CRM software.