Highland Tank Gives Its Sales Team Remote Access to Critical Sales Data with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM 
Customer: Highland Tank
Location: Stoystown, PA
Solution: Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM with Microsoft Applications Stack
Highland Tank & Manufacturing Company, Inc., established in 1946, manufactures steel storage tank products for commercial and industrial customers in a broad range of industries including environmental, government, plumbing, water, fuel, utilities, transportation and more. Based in Stoystown, PA, the company has eight state-of-the-art fabrication facilities—in Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, and Michigan—where it manufactures petroleum, water, and chemical storage tanks, oil/water separators, grease interceptors, filtration systems, pressure vessels, and more. Highland Tank customizes its tanks and vessels to each customers’ specifications and in compliance with UL, NFPA, API, AWWA, OSHA, and SWRI standards.
Since its inception and throughout its years of growth and expansion, Highland Tank has always made building and strengthening customer relationships a priority. However, doing so efficiently and effectively hasn’t always been easy.
The Challenge: A Previous CRM System with Limited Capabilities
With the company’s sales representatives navigating large territories and handling an expanded range of product offerings, it was becoming more challenging to manage relationships with prospects and customers. According to Robert Duppstadt, Jr., Sales Manager at Highland Tank, in 2011, the company had implemented an on-premise CRM system, but by 2017 they had outgrown its capabilities.
“Our sales team spends a great deal of time in the field and needs to access information remotely,” explained Duppstadt. “We originally used a Windows-based version of the CRM with remote databases on each sales person’s laptop. Wi-Fi access in remote locations in 2011 was unpredictable and unreliable synchronization with the main database created issues for our team. We converted to the vendor’s web-based version of its CRM to avoid syncing issues, but it didn’t work well for us. The Outlook sync with the product failed.”
Duppstadt also shared that the CRM had been creating appointment duplication, thus causing additional inconvenience. “Its inability to work well with Outlook and sync correctly caused our sales team to lose confidence in it. It was inhibiting rather than helping us maintain and manage our relationships with prospects and customers.”
Highland Tank’s IT Department and Duppstadt knew it was time to look for a better way, so they began to research what cloud-based CRM platforms had the features and functionality to meet their needs.
“We chose Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM for a variety of reasons,” Duppstadt said. “Microsoft’s and the platform’s reputation, positive reviews, seamless integration with Outlook and other Microsoft applications…all were considerations that led us to the decision.”
After selecting Dynamics 365 CRM, Highland Tank met with two Microsoft partners and ultimately decided on Cargas.
“It was a matter of fit. We liked Cargas’s experience and the approach they proposed for making the transition from our former CRM to Dynamics 365 CRM. It also made sense geographically. Cargas’s Lancaster location is close to our facility in Manheim, PA,” shared Duppstadt.
The Cargas Solution: Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM and Native Integrations with Other Microsoft Applications
With Cargas’s help, Highland Tank now has a robust cloud-based CRM solution that enables its sales team to stay informed, maintain better records, and keep on top of opportunities. Along with Dynamics 365 CRM, the company is also taking advantage of the Microsoft “stack” (native integrations with Outlook, SharePoint, OneNote, and other MS Office 365 applications).
According to Duppstadt, their most significant objective in using Dynamics 365 CRM was to give the sales team a window into the history of interactions, activities, appointments, and opportunities with prospects. “We wanted to be able to look back and see what we bid on in the past, why we didn’t get the sale, and learn other details about the interactions to give us insight.”
Duppstadt shared that knowing their past contact with engineers is especially critical. Approximately one-quarter of Highland Tank’s sales team’s time is focused on the engineering community because having engineers specify the company’s products for projects is a significant factor in getting a sale.
“The majority of engineers we call on don’t end up on our customer list; they never actually purchase from Highland Tank. However, they are critical to future sales as they write specifications for large industrial and commercial projects. So, we want to be aware of which engineers are dealing with the products we manufacture,” he explained. “With Dynamics 365 CRM and access to other Microsoft applications through it, we can view past emails, notes from past appointments, and other information. Cargas also helped us develop an automated process that allows our sales team to stay in closer contact with prospects in the engineering community and stay on top of those opportunities.”
Highland Tank is using SharePoint as a central location to store and share files, including those created in OneNote where sales team members can create and save notes from discovery meetings or other interactions. All users can open OneNote directly from the Account and Opportunity records in CRM, giving them convenient access to important details.
The access to up-to-date information anytime and from anywhere has been another significant benefit of Dynamics 365 CRM. Before the implementation, users had a sales database on their laptops, and they had to manually synchronize their laptop’s version with the server when they returned from the field so that others could see their updates and vice versa.
“With Dynamics 365 CRM, everything is updated in real time,” said Duppstadt. “Now, it’s easy to share information across our organization almost immediately. We didn’t have that level of collaboration before.”
Dynamics 365 CRM’s dashboard feature also helps keep the Highland Tank sales team members and others in the company on the same page. Duppstadt has created a dashboard for his team that provides an at-a-glance view of their current activities, appointments, leads, and opportunities. He has also set up a dashboard for company product managers that’s relevant to their role and one for the executive team, which they use as a management tool.
“With Dynamics 365 CRM, everything is updated in real time. Now, it’s easy to share information across our organization almost immediately. We didn’t have that level of collaboration before.”
Robert Duppstadt, Jr., Sales Manager
Overall Impact and an Eye on the Future
“Thanks to Cargas’s implementation of Dynamics 365 CRM, our sales team has become more organized and aware of what it should focus on,” shared Duppstadt. “It can spend more time making and strengthening relationships because the automated workflow has decreased our administrative burden.”
Duppstadt said that Highland Tank’s inside sales team (the group that creates proposal packets) isn’t using the CRM yet, but the company anticipates rolling it out to them in the future to further enhance the efficiency and cross-team collaborative benefits of the platform.
“CRM presents a pool of possibilities. Right now, we have our foot in the water. There are many tools and features we look forward to using to develop ways to make our teams work smarter and more efficiently,” Duppstadt explained. “One long-term goal is to use Dynamics 365’s ERP capabilities to manage not only sales but also inventory and more.”
The Cargas Experience
In May of 2018, Cargas began working with Highland Tank to transition from its former CRM to Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. The project went live in July 2018—a considerably short window of time to migrate all of the data and have users up to speed with the new system.
“We decided in late 2017 that we wanted to switch to Dynamics 365 CRM, and we began our research of viable implementation partners in early 2018. After deciding on Cargas, we determined the best time to do the migration would be in July 2018 because all of our outside sales team would be at one place, at our headquarters, for a week,” explained Duppstadt. “It was a bit of a fire drill—a rush situation with the added complexity of converting data from one format to another—but Cargas didn’t flinch or falter. They handled it well and met our deadline. Some things might have been done differently if given more time, but the implementation was successful, our entire team was trained, and we started strong.”
According to Duppstadt, besides knowing the product inside and out, the Cargas team was—and continues to be—responsive and helpful.
“There are many aspects of Dynamics 365 CRM that we haven’t explored yet, but we look forward to doing more with it with the help of Cargas. I know that the more we use the solution, the more we’ll discover how it can improve our processes and benefit our company.”
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