Chris: C.H Robinson is the world's most powerful supply chain platform. We make connections between shippers and the means of transportation around the world. We are 15,000 people around the world managing global supply chains. And we do that with a global network of great people and great technology. Microsoft spent a huge part of that story for us. We use Microsoft Dynamics 365 in our business. Having everything in one place, having one view of all of our customer's data has helped us do a couple of smart things. We show up more prepared to our customers. We understand what they have and what we manage of their business and what we don't.

James: We needed a CRM to help be more customer-centric, help us get a 360-degree view of the customers, really make our sales and account managers more proficient, and give a better outcome to our customers. So really making sure that we're driving adoption and usage back into that tool and then setting up those processes that help us uncover business intelligence across our business. It was really clear that we needed the right integrator. We selected PowerObjects for a lot of different reasons. They brought an awesome team together. And I would tell you, it's been one of those things where you can't tell who's PowerObjects and who's C.H. Robinson.

Jen: This was going to be one of the biggest changes from a technology and a process standpoint that they've been through in many, many years. We really wanted to gain their trust. So really selling the tool to them as part of that change management was critical.

James: We trained with our PowerObjects partners, helping us lead that change management strategy. We trained 75 business partners. They went out into our network and trained 1,500 people in two weeks. When you think back about launching to 300 people, then to 1,700 people, and then finishing out with 3,000 to be at roughly an 85% rate of adoption, we feel like we did something right. We've seen like a 300% increase of amount of activities being entered by our account managers in the tool. We not only rolled out to 3,000 users, but we built the instance, as well as we've got a positive ROI in month 11.

Jen: Salesperson wants to update data, right? Our goal really is to take the data that they enter and serve it back up to them in a way that gives them insights that they can action on.

James: We've been able to take about 40% to 60% of salespeople's time trying to find leads and actually digitalize that experience by connecting some other things through Dynamics 365, thus returning a ton of time and efficiency back to our sales force.

Jen: A lot of the tools that we've put into place really expand the knowledge that the representative has with the customer, so that they're asking bigger questions and more questions and really understanding the customer's business. We want them to be able to more easily document their conversations and their action plans, and we can use Power Apps to really streamline that process and minimize the clicks, but also keep track of all the information.

James: And now we're serving that back up in better dashboards around Power BI that allow people to actually see the information and help them take action against what they're supposed to be doing. We're seeing a lot of really great adoption from a process standpoint.

Chris: The levels of automation, the future of the cloud, the future of AI, the things that we can pull back into Dynamics are really going to change the lives of our sales force. It's better for our bottom line. It's better for our employees, and it's better for our customers.

James: It's gone better than I ever would've thought. I think it's because of the partnership with Microsoft. I think we selected the right tool. I think it's also been the partnership with PowerObjects because without them really building the tool behind the scenes and understanding our business as well, and so it's really been that aggregation of those three teams coming together.