Situation Twenty years ago, the world of buying and selling heavy equipment was a simpler one. Machinery Trader, one of the well-known trade magazines from Sandhills Publishing, was a ready resource. A contractor looking for a used crawler dozer, for example, could find in its pages a list of all the crawler dozers for sale nearby, complete with pictures and detailed specifications. The contractor or dealer selling the equipment created an ad by sending photos and copy to a graphic designer, who pasted up the magazine by hand. The prospective buyer would call the seller; the seller would jot notes on a scrap of paper; and if they were fortunate the deal would go through and everyone would be happy.
The world has grown more complex. Machinery Trader magazine still exists, and it has been augmented by www.machinerytrader.com. As for layout and design? There’s no paste anywhere in sight; everything is done electronically, and hardly anyone uses “snail mail” to deliver photos and copy to Sandhills.
In the field, though, among the companies buying and selling heavy equipment, some things have remained relatively unchanged. Many of the companies with which Sandhills works have between 5 and 20 employees. They often lack the resources to deploy and support a modern customer relationship management (CRM) system that would make it easier to manage customers, inventory, and sales leads. As a consequence, many of these companies have lead tracking and inventory control systems that still rely on scraps of paper and notes jotted in the margin of legal pads.
Yet Sandhills is quietly fostering a technological revolution among its customers. Understanding its customers might not deploy such a solution on their own, Sandhills has begun to offer them access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a hosted service. Using either Microsoft Office Outlook or Microsoft Internet Explorer®, Sandhills’ customers can access all the key CRM functions enabled by Microsoft Dynamics CRM-including customer and lead tracking, inventory control, and more. Moreover, as part of its Dealer Services offering, Sandhills has integrated Microsoft Dynamics CRM into its own advertising and publishing system-so its customers can easily enter pictures and information about machinery in inventory and instantly upload that information to Sandhills’ publishing system, where it is pushed into Machinery Trader, machinerytrader.com, Truck Paper, truckpaper.com and/or other publications.
Solution Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business management solutions that managers can use to make business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics works like and with familiar Microsoft software, automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship, and supply chain processes in a way that helps drive business success.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a customer relationship management solution that provides the tools and capabilities needed to create and easily maintain a clear picture of customers, from first contact through to purchase and post-sales. With modules for sales, marketing, and customer service, Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivers a fast, flexible, and affordable solution that drives consistent, measurable improvements in every business process, enabling closer relationships with customers and helping to achieve new levels of profitability.
Today, more than 900 companies have subscribed to the hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM component of Sandhills’ Dealer Services offering. There are more than 1,000 registered users, and Sandhills officials say that they’re adding an average of 20 users each day. Each user has access to the full range of features and functions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Sandhills places no limits on resources or disk space a customer uses.
“We wanted Microsoft Dynamics CRM to be a solution that dealers can use to do all their marketing, sales, mail merges, and everything else,” says Kim Mehring, manager hosted solutions. “So, when you sign up for Sandhills’ Dealer Services, you get access to everything. You might not use all of it. You might not even use 10 percent of what’s there. But it’s there, and as dealers become more familiar with the functionality that Microsoft Dynamics CRM affords they can take greater advantage of it.”
Hosting for High Availability and Ease of Access Sandhills runs its hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM service from redundant data centers in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Scottsdale, Arizona. The service relies on 10 IBM BladeCenter Servers (5 active/5 redundant) running the Windows Server 2003 operating system. Each server is configured with Intel processors. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 supports the hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM offering, and the BladeCenter Servers running SQL Server are configured with dual-core Intel processors and 8 gigabytes of memory for performance advantages. Two HP All-in-One Storage Systems (1 active/1 redundant) provide shared data storage for this and Sandhills’ premium hosted messaging service, which is based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.
Sandhills takes advantage of the Microsoft Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA) to offer hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so it pays license fees on a per user/per month basis, and Sandhills only pays license fees for the number of users subscribing to the system at any given time. Sandhills includes a single user license to Microsoft Dynamics CRM as part of its Dealer Services package; dealers can add additional users for a nominal fee, which covers the cost of additional seats under the terms of the SPLA.
Dealers can access Microsoft Dynamics CRM using either Microsoft Internet Explorer or the Microsoft Dynamics client for Microsoft Office Outlook. “We use a combination of both,” says Greg Loseke, manager of Dealer Services for the Sandhills CRM initiative. “If you’re using the Office Outlook client, you can track your e-mail messages right against the customer record in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You don’t have to rekey comments or anything. There’s also a
Customized to Meet Dealer Needs Companies buying and selling heavy equipment have special concerns and requirements, and Sandhills has customized certain areas of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to accommodate these industry-specific requirements. For example, it has created an industry-specific inventory management system inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM that enables a dealer to capture and maintain equipment information. Dealers can identify which features are present in a given piece of equipment, how long the equipment has been in service, and more.
