Brentwood Industries Automates Sales Processes with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM
Customer: Brentwood Industries, Inc.
Location: Reading, PA
Solution: Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM
Brentwood was founded as a thermoformer in 1965, but their willingness to take on any project to meet their customers’ needs has led to so much more. As Brentwood adapted and expanded their offerings to serve their customers, they grew into new plastics, applications, products, and industries and became experts in all aspects of the plastics manufacturing process.
Brentwood serves customers in a wide range of industries, including the cooling tower segment where they manufacture plastic fill packs and drift eliminators to enhance the cooling process, to the medical segment where they create custom packaging for sterile medical devices, to their name-brand wheelbarrows and other custom thermoformed and injection molded products.
With such a wide range of capabilities, Brentwood has grown nationally and globally during the past 50 years. They currently have seven locations across the United States, with international locations in Thailand, the Czech Republic, and India.
As a global company with multiple sales teams serving a variety of vastly different industries, Brentwood needed a tool to help drive sales and marketing success.
A Blank Slate
Brentwood’s challenge was not a clunky, out-of-date legacy system, but rather no system at all.
“We were relying heavily on Outlook to retain records, mainly through shared contacts lists,” explained Caitlin Banta, Director of Marketing & IT. “We logged a lot of lead information in Excel spreadsheets. It really wasn’t efficient for us. Not to mention our data was poorly maintained, often outdated, and not easily secured.”
Without a centralized database, Brentwood was also limited in their ability to analyze the information they had collected.
“We didn’t even come close to the capabilities of a true CRM system,” said Banta. “We weren’t able to glean any insights from all of the data that we amassed over the years.”
It was time to make a change. At first, it was the IT team who recommended the implementation of a CRM system. They weighed their options and proposed a well-known solution with a high upfront cost. It was sticker shock for the executive team, trying to weigh the value of an IT tool against such an extreme price point, and the project stalled.
But the need for a sales and marketing tool didn’t go away. A few years later, the discussion was reopened, this time led by a Sales and Marketing team. They were looking for a system that was equal in functionality to the solution originally proposed by IT, but without the hefty upfront cost. In addition to the core functionality of a centralized database, they wanted marketing automation and more powerful analytics.
“We were looking for something that would give us insight into our pipeline, our ability to convert our customers, and allow us to extend our reach with automated marketing,” said Banta.
They also wanted a system that was flexible enough to allow the Brentwood team, new to the CRM concept, to grow into it gradually. An immediate jump to full CRM functionality seemed too extreme.
“We weren’t ready for that,” Banta explained. “As our first foray into CRM, we needed to instill the culture in the company of maintaining our sales data.”
This time, after evaluating the options, the Sales and Marketing team proposed Microsoft Dynamics 365 to the Brentwood executive team.
“It didn’t have the seven-figure upfront price tag. It was equal in many ways, but it would allow us to adopt at our own pace and grow into a CRM solution,” said Banta.
Because Brentwood was an existing Microsoft customer, Dynamics 365 had the added benefit of seamlessly integrating with their other Microsoft tools.
A Local Partnership
With their chosen solution in mind, Brentwood went in search of a local implementation consultant and connected with Cargas. Brentwood strives to work with local partners as much as possible, valuing the ability to engage face to face.
Memie Whiteside and Dave Packard from Cargas led the Brentwood project, with support from additional members of the Cargas team. Their challenge was to understand Brentwood’s unique business and configure the system to meet their requirements.
“We have a pretty complicated business. The number of markets and industries we’re involved in is just the tip of the iceberg. We have multiple sales groups and they all work in different ways and they have different existing tools and different personalities and the industries they serve have different requirements,” said Banta. “I had doubts in the beginning about whether somebody from the outside who doesn’t engage in our selling processes every day could actually learn our landscape. The Cargas team impressed me and dispelled my doubts right away.”
Working with Dave and Memie, Brentwood began their incremental rollout of Dynamics 365, starting with one division in their first year and continuing throughout the company. They have just completed the implementation for their last domestic division.
The Power of Information
As Dynamics 365 has been implemented throughout the company, Brentwood has gradually grown and adapted the system’s functionality.
“We continued to refine it, further customize it, and roll in more functionality, such as quoting and web integration and lots of custom workflows,” said Banta.
Brentwood also took advantage of system add-ons like ClickDimensions for marketing automation and Maplytics for optimized sales calls.
With one centralized database, Brentwood has gained confidence in the security and accuracy of their data. And they have begun to unleash the power of their newfound analysis capabilities.
“We couldn’t do anything with our data before and now we’re using sales data to drive change. It’s obviously great to visualize a pipeline, but we’re also finding some really interesting insights that help us evolve our strategies. It’s bringing focus to our sales and marketing efforts.”
Caitlin Banta, Director of Marketing & IT of Brentwood Industries
The management team is enjoying greater insight into what their sales teams are doing, especially remote teams, while automated processes are improving efficiency and customer service. An integration to Brentwood’s website automatically creates a lead in Dynamics 365 when a visitor submits a contact form. Connecting the lead directly to the necessary salesperson has improved response time to web inquiries. Some of the automated processes are actually translating into real dollar figures.
“Workflows we’ve created, even some as simple as, ‘If we haven’t received a response to a quote for two weeks, send an email,’ have had direct and immediate impact to our revenue,” said Banta.
Planning for the Future
With Dynamics 365 implemented across their domestic divisions and the team beginning to take advantage of its full capabilities, Brentwood is looking to the future. They are planning to implement the system at their international locations next and will continue to expand the functionality. Right now, they are in the early stages of an integration with Power BI, which will allow Brentwood to leverage the data insights tool to create dashboards.
As they grow their CRM solution, Brentwood will continue to look to Cargas for implementation services and advice about understanding the changing landscape of Microsoft products.
“I like that Cargas has become a trusted resource for us. Sometimes navigating offerings from Microsoft can be confusing,” said Banta. “We’ll often go to Cargas to say, ‘Hey, help us make sense of this. What should we be doing?’ And the answers that we get are not another sales pitch, they help us navigate those complexities. It’s great that we can trust them to steer us on the right path.”
With a flexible and scalable CRM system in place and a trusted partner at their side, Brentwood has unleashed the power of information to drive their sales and marketing efforts and established a foundation for future growth.
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