With Dynamics 365 Sales, Glencore Technology increases workflow efficiencies by 50%

Glencore Technology develops, markets, and supports mining process technologies for the global mining industry. For several decades, they have served the global mineral processing, metals smelting, and refining industries with a range of specialist products and services. The company's previous CRM solution struggled with poor customer engagement tracking and a lack of integration capabilities. They wanted to provide greater value to clients throughout the sales process and improve internal reporting capabilities. After piloting Microsoft Power BI, they discovered Dynamics 365 Sales, and pivoted to a Microsoft solution.

Glencore Technology worked with Microsoft partner Data#3 to deploy Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Power BI. The company now uses Dynamics 365 Sales to manage all aspects of the sales process. They replaced legacy applications with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to improve lead management and gain insights into the effectiveness of marketing strategies. With Dynamics 365 Sales, they increased workflow efficiencies and overall data quality, while improving the customer experience across the sales lifecycle.

Challenges of tracking customer engagements and adding integrations

Glencore Technology's previous solution was sufficient to track ongoing opportunities in the sales cycle—but lacked the capability to add integrations with the company's existing systems architecture as business requirements changed. "We wanted features in Dynamics 365 Sales that would allow us to automate processes, especially between applications—to minimize double handling of data, reduce the instances of human error, and improve our data integrity," says Jo Hardie, Business Analyst at Glencore Technology. The company also wanted to improve lead management, and gain insights into marketing strategies and business performance. It required a solution that explored machine-learning use cases to identify industry trends and deliver automated insights.

From exploring Power BI to optimizing the sales cycle with Dynamics 365 Sales

Glencore Technology had initially piloted Power BI as a real-time reporting tool across the organization—and quickly realized the benefits of integrating Microsoft Power Platform with its existing system architecture. Hardie clarifies, "We saw the benefit of migrating our systems to applications hosted within Power Platform, so we could house all our data—unified in a single database (Dataverse) and add automations between systems to streamline processes." With Power BI, Glencore Technology unified data from disparate data sources with real-time reporting to provide company leadership a holistic picture of business performance.

The company then sought to optimize the sales cycle—automating the lead-capture process from various marketing channels to track sales opportunities. It also wanted to better measure marketing budget ROI, and identify channels that provided the most reach and traction—all while nurturing customers through proven channels to gain ongoing business intelligence. To solve these substantial go-to-market strategy challenges, they worked with Data#3. The Microsoft partner was instrumental in assisting with the successful deployment of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales across the company. The customer relationship management (CRM) solution has helped to manage Glencore's entire sales process, from prospecting to purchase orders—and replaced legacy applications with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to improve lead management. The Dynamics 365 Sales mobile application implemented under Data#3's guidance delivered additional benefits for the sales team—recording leads and tracking customer interactions at industry conferences. The Glencore Technology team currently uses the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app to track customer interactions during sales engagements across the globe.

The impact of Dynamics 365 Sales on monitoring the sales cycle

Glencore Technology realized substantial workflow orchestration efficiencies with Dynamics 365 Sales—an increase in reporting and workflow efficiencies to the tune of 50%. Automated reporting empowered them to save time and easily meet monthly executive reporting cadences. Workflow automations for the Sales team made processes significantly more efficient by digitizing workflows and approvals and integrating them with existing team processes. In addition, data orchestration empowered employees to provide sales quotes to customers faster by working directly from the same data platform, reviewing one set of data from anywhere in the world. "The use of Power Automate in conjunction with the Dynamics 365 Sales Notifications Center allows us to keep all members informed of changes to sales opportunities in real time, and automate the handover of projects from our sales to our delivery teams," Hardie says.

Robotic process automation with Dynamics 365 Sales, leveraging Power Automate, made business processes more efficient and reduced manual efforts across the Sales team. Efficiencies gleaned from process improvement have reduced manual efforts by 25%. Hardie says, "Using Dynamics 365 Sales and Power Automate is certainly helping us move away from unnecessary meetings and emails, and delivers productivity improvements, and I think there is only upside from here. As our maturity using the platforms improves, we will start to see greater ROI." 

After completing upgrades to major systems infrastructure, Glencore Technology will turn its focus to optimizing existing platforms with machine learning. They’re open to exploring the use of AI, including Copilot, in future workflows to improve operational efficiencies across the enterprise. They’re particularly interested in the prospect of machine learning to help identify and score the most valuable sales opportunities.