Bringing order to a fast-growing sales operation with Dynamics CRM

The challenge

dotDigital had grown from a small web agency into a full-service digital marketing business with over 50 specialists. That growth was a success story, but it had left the sales operation running on improvisation rather than process.

Leads and customer records lived across a collection of spreadsheets, each account manager working in their own way. Compiling a sales report meant cross-referencing multiple files and hoping nothing had been missed. As new staff joined, there was no consistent way to bring them up to speed or ensure they were following the same approach as everyone else.

There was a more specific problem too. dotDigital sold through third-party resellers as well as directly, and there was no reliable way to see which customers already belonged to a partner. That created a real risk of the dotDigital sales team contacting a customer who was already being served by a reseller, which could damage those partner relationships.

What we built

We identified Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the right foundation and built a customised implementation around dotDigital's specific needs, integrating it with Microsoft Office, Sage, and dotDigital's own proprietary platform.

The centrepiece of the build was a custom fuzzy matching system. When a new lead comes in, whether from a web form or another source, the system searches across multiple fields in every existing record and scores the incoming data against what it finds. Depending on that score, the lead is either created fresh, flagged as a likely duplicate, or automatically merged with an existing record. The scoring thresholds and what happens next are all driven by workflows configured to match how dotDigital's business actually runs.

This meant that the reseller problem was solved at source. Partner-managed accounts sit in a separate part of the system, and any new lead is checked against both direct and partner customer bases before anyone picks up the phone.

What changed

The CRM gave dotDigital something they hadn't had before: a single, reliable picture of their sales operation.

Leads were assigned correctly from the moment they came in, with duplicates handled automatically rather than discovered embarrassingly down the line. Reporting on group sales became a matter of running a report rather than reconciling spreadsheets. The introduction of the system also prompted a broader tightening of sales and marketing processes, with formal procedures now backed by workflows that guide users through the right steps rather than relying on individual habit.

The net result was less time spent on administration, more consistency across the team, and a much lower risk of the kind of data mistakes that can cost client relationships.