Tessenderlo Group: 5 benefits of moving to a cloud CRM

Tessenderlo Group is founded and headquartered in Belgium, employs over 4,800 people and is active in over 100 countries. Its activities range from agriculture to bio-valorization, energy and industrial solutions. A user-friendly CRM to follow up their sales is crucial for Tessenderlo Group, since it has multiple business units. Three of their business units were using an outdated legacy CRM, which lacked a holistic overview of their data. So Tessenderlo Group called in Flexso’s help to migrate this CRM into one central cloud-based system for all business units.

A single source of truth

“The first stage was the migration of three datasets and existing functionality into one central CRM which was available at all our mobile sales devices”, says Koen Verstraete, SVP ICT at Tessenderlo Group.

“With SAP Sales Cloud, we wanted to lay the foundation for a futureproof system. The scope was limited to the technical migration of the new CRM to increase user adoption. This means a fit2standard setup was perfect for this project, so the Flexso Accelerator was the ideal approach. The analysis phase went very fast, as we sticked to the out-of the box solution.”

Increasing user adoption

The migration was preceded by a discovery phase to help Tessenderlo Group’s management gain insight in the new CRM and the migration. “Flexso organized workshops, followed by demos of SAP Sales Cloud”, Koen continues. “We decided to go for the basic setup to increase user adoption and if necessary scale up the solution later. The biggest win from this migration is the increased user-friendliness, which is the first step to a wider usage of the CRM.”

“Because the new system is very user-friendly, they like using it”, confirms Roxana-Maria Foarce, salesperson at Tessenderlo Group. “It’s more intuitive, requires less clicks and the interface provides a better overview.”

User-friendly CRM

“Our legacy SAP CRM system was outdated and a bit too complex” says Roxana. “You had to be quite technical to extract data from the old CRM. So salespeople experienced it as extra work, with little benefits for them. They would use their own spreadsheets, address books and phones. The user-friendliness of the SAP Sales Cloud has lowered the boundary to start using the CRM. More ease of use means less hassle for the sales people.”

Future integrations

“The integration with our SAP ERP back-end systems works well”, Koen Verstraete continues. “Now that we’ve centralized our databases in one CRM, the maintenance cost has significantly lowered and we have a futureproof system in place. We will expand functionalities and further integrate it with Office 365 when the system is widely used and supported by our sales team. With the 360 customer view, we are hoping to implement better reporting and more business intelligence into our processes.”

Close collaboration

“The Flexso team was a pleasure to work with”, Koen concludes. “After the workshops and webinars, we had some meetings where we discussed the priorities and scope of the project. Since every business unit had their own needs, it was important to align the teams. Once the project was up and running, the Flexso team was readily available to answer any questions and support us where necessary. Thanks to the Flexso Accelerator and the reliable Flexso team, we were able to deliver this project on time and within budget.”