Westcon-Comstor Optimizes Global Sales Process with Dynamics 365 Sales Solution

Westcon-Comstor, a technology distributor with offices across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific, recently completed the first phases of its global sales process optimization program, which involved deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to 1,700 users in the company’s offices worldwide.

The company, which does business both as Westcon and Comstor, aimed to achieve a few goals with their D365 Sales implementation: globally standardized sales processes, improved partner alignment, enhanced customer identification and deal closure, streamlined quote-to-order processes, and creating a single source of truth for customer information. 

All geographies have now been live using the Sales Process Optimization (SPO) platform for over six months, with a reported 92 percent user adoption rate for daily selling activities. Rhys Jones, vice president of process and technology at Westcon-Comstor, spoke with MSDW about how Dynamics 365 Sales fit into the company’s strategic initiatives, how they aligned it with their key value drivers related to vendor relationships, and the path they have followed to deploy such a wide-ranging solution. 

Westcon-Comstor has been on a digital transformation journey for the last seven to ten years. Modernizing its CRM system became a next logical initiative thanks to earlier IT successes like building out its data analytics and integration competencies. Jones explained:

We left our CRM system, [as a next stage] to ensure that we were building that on top of the rest of our technical stack, allowing us to future proof our business within a world of data-driven sales. 

One of the early assumptions guiding the project was that the company structure would remain unchanged. D365 Sales proved to align well with this approach and allowed the company to focus on its unified sales methodology.

We started off with that intent [of a unified sales methodology]. And that's what we want to achieve with full standardization across the globe. Across many countries with so many people and different products, there is some variation. But I’m happy to say that we have kept a standard across the globe. So when something is done in Australia versus the UK versus Germany, the main core of the sales framework is there. The detail of how it's executed, the phone call, the meeting, the marketing campaign, those types of things [will differ], obviously. But the framework is truly global.

Westcon-Comstor currently has over 100 vendors globally. They build and maintain system integrations with some, and that buildout can be a highly bespoke effort. An internal team has taken on that responsibility to build integrations in a common way that they can own and use in the context of their internal systems. Jones explained some of the priorities: