Driving Profit from Sales and Marketing: Wholesale Distributors Discover, React to Customer Profitability Data in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The wholesale distribution business has long been a strong adopter of ERP technology to manage all aspects back office operations. And when the economy was in good shape and sales reps were making their numbers on a regular basis, few managers worried about whether sales and marketing teams had enough visibility into the transactional data that powered their organizations.

But things have changed - as orders and profits shrank in recent years, wholesale distributors started taking a closer look at every aspect of their business, which meant embracing IT solutions beyond ERP and other back office systems - systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

"Whereas ERP is very advanced in wholesale distribution companies, they have been slower to adopt CRM," says David Buggy, COO of Beringer Associates, an IT services firm based in New Jersey that deploys Microsoft Dynamics CRM for the needs of wholesale distribution companies.  

A focus on wholesale distribution has helped Beringer, a Microsoft industry partner for Dynamics CRM, to identify industry-specific needs, some of which they have packaged as CRM add-on features.  The focus, according to Buggy, is in two key areas: calculating "real time customer profitability" and integrating ERP data within the CRM system to increase the visibility for sales reps.

The idea of real time customer profitability in Beringer's solution is based partly on traditional concepts of business intelligence and partly on the ability to feed data directly back into workflows and entities within Dynamics CRM.  The approach stemmed from the need for wholesale distributors to move beyond the gross profit calculations and finding ways to operate sales and marketing based on the ...