2buy2

How a new CRM strategy delivers value at 2buy2

As champions of procurement, 2buy2 goes above and beyond to achieve their vision of providing ‘Excellent Procurement that is Values Driven’. Established in 2009, the company provides procurement services designed to align with its customers’ individual goals.

2buy2 adds value to its service through a personalised approach, in which dedicated experts tailor their support and advice to maximise specific customer resources and develop long-lasting relationships. The company stands by its values, promising to be passionate and to work with integrity, excellence, and respect, all while helping customers achieve great value.

Optimisation = Outcomes

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s all about growth. And in order to grow, companies have to invest in improving performance, not just doing more of the same thing, but doing it better and faster. 2buy2 is an SME that made the big decision to invest in optimising its customer operations, front office, and middle office.

The first step was to lead with a strategic audit to unveil performance gaps to be able to create the business case and justify the investment required to optimise sales processes. This would result in more tangible business outcomes such as better visibility of the sales pipeline, sales forecast, better customer service, and improved account management.

The company’s main objective is to help customers improve the way they run procurement processes, with a strong focus on efficiency and effectiveness. This type of focus requires a plethora of information about their clients, potential providers, documentation regulations, and more, requiring 2buy2 to build a workflow that is structured, user-friendly, yet effective.

Spreadsheets, word documents, and folders were inefficient, inconsistent, and simply weren’t getting the job done fast enough – the company needed a software tool that could manage the process in one, centralised effective way.

Data as a Valuable Business Asset

Data should be a valuable asset in any company, business opportunities are lost when data is not managed to deliver such value. The company was able to recognise that manual processes were barriers to performance, disjointed data living in spreadsheets, and different systems and flows were barriers to streamlining performance.

Aggregating the data to create a sales forecast was a challenging task that repeated every month. Because of this, 2buy2 was working with a limited vision of sales performance – only aware of earnings billed, but unaware of opportunities lost along the way, their value, and lost reason.

redk approached data from a different perspective. What processes generate what data? What is the value of this data surfacing in the form of KPIs? How can these insights be used to improve effectiveness in the different areas of the business?

The result is that data can now be accessed by the different team members in the form of reports and insights, the CRM data model has also been developed to allow integration with other key systems e.g., finance systems, which has significantly improved visibility. This helps employees make real-time decisions about not only sales operations and account management, but on how to directly support their customers.

Focus on the Customer

Beyond efficiency and revenue, the company understood that in today’s digital world, it is all about customer experience and customer satisfaction.

‘We are not just looking for efficiency for efficiency’s sake. We’ve got to keep the customer at the top of the list.’

So, it was time for a change.

2buy2 knew that it was time to strategise the use of CRM technology in a way that would optimise processes, take control of the data, and, in turn, deliver insights on what their customers really want and need. For this, 2buy2 turned to us at redk to help them rethink their strategy.

The Right Questions

Building a CRM solution tailored to 2buy2’s unique services required an overall understanding of the company’s aim. What is your business about? How do you generate revenue? How do you mitigate loss of revenue? How do you use technology to your advantage and where are the pitfalls in your current processes? How will these technologies ensure that your organisation optimises and reaches digital maturity?

The CRM expert team at redk sat down with 2buy2 to analyse these questions, as well as the business functions, roles, and processes across each department, in order to map out their current business cycles. This gave us the information necessary to see how far their current technologies could take them. In this analysis, we developed the optimal process-and-technology design for the company’s needs.

A Business-Outcome Oriented Design

2buy2 had pre-selected their CRM software from our partners at SugarCRM, and our technical team built a solution that met the goals laid out in our strategic design. Once the solution was in place, a lot of work went into guaranteeing the quality of the data. In order to maintain data integrity, all the data stored in spreadsheets and the outdated CRM system had to be cleaned, restructured, and migrated into the new CRM solution.

The data had been moved and the CRM software was running at full speed. But the work wasn’t over. redk guided 2buy2 in applying best practices to deliver a higher impact for the business. The initial software solution is something that evolves and matures with the business, and part of the digital transformation process includes organisational change management.

The implementation was delivered with direct involvement from the 2buy2 leadership to support the success of this initiative. Implementing best practices was as much part of the process as improving the use of technology; along with a system to support the ongoing and continuous improvement of the solution.

The company now has a value-oriented perspective on its CRM software, which means that every piece of the system is focused on delivering an impact, a business outcome, that can help the company reach its business objectives.

Our collaboration with 2buy2 has turned into a long-term relationship and we look forward to watching their growth over time.