voestalpine’s market-leading High Performance Metals Division launches new products and services to the most relevant customers with CRM Analytics

voestalpine is one of the largest manufacturing companies in Austria, and the High Performance Metals Division is the global market leader in its sector. Unlike its competitors, it offers a full range of products and services to customers from the transport, consumer goods, mechanical engineering, and oil and gas industries. We spoke to Martin Bileck, Global CRM Coordinator of the High Performance Metals Division, to find out how he and the global CRM team are driving data culture across the company, and how it helps voestalpine to stay ahead of the game.

Martin: When I joined the team just over four years ago, we were in the middle of our Salesforce CRM rollout. We now have 140 locations across 25 countries, and 1,600 Salesforce users across sales and marketing. It can be challenging to act on a global level and respond to different analytics demands. Everyone needs different data displayed in different ways. Whilst the Salesforce dashboards were great, I knew that CRM Analytics could help us dive deeper and get richer insights from CRM and website data. voestalpine has always been a data, fact, and number-driven company, but was handling numbers with data warehouse & PowerPoint slides. Now it’s time to work with interactive dashboards and real-time data.

Martin: The biggest challenge is always user adoption. It’s no good simply building a dashboard and sharing a link. We put a lot of effort into training users on how to use the solution. We ran global webinars on different topics and explained how analytics supports various business cases. Even though CRM Analytics is really user-friendly, it still takes time for people to get used to a new solution. We worked alongside a focus group of 50 people on the marketing team to capture feedback and adapt the solution to make sure it met their needs.

Martin: We have 240 global users across sales, marketing, and product development, and that includes front-line staff, sales managers, and managing directors. We realized that people view reports differently in different regions, but CRM Analytics allows us to create dynamic visualizations that can be viewed in lots of different ways. For example, sales managers in Germany prefer to look at orders on a weekly basis, whilst our Asian team check them daily, and North American staff track them monthly. Not having to create 10 different dashboards was a real time saver! And the solution remembers employee preferences, so when they open it, the information is displayed the way they like it.

Martin: We have three marketing dashboards: the target group, regional marketing, and leads dashboard. We used to spend hours pulling together contact lists in Excel, but now we can pull contacts based on different criteria for target groups in seconds. The regional marketing dashboard then reports on three key metrics to track performance. We look at how many campaigns were sent, and how many leads they generated, and we can look at those figures over time, by sales company, or globally. Finally, leads are displayed in a simple dashboard to show how many were generated, how likely they are to convert, and which are the hottest leads to focus on.

Martin: We’ve got 11 sales dashboards, from the customer 360 dashboard that shows all account-related data in real time, to a visiting dashboard to prioritize and track whom we see in person, and management dashboards. With CRM Analytics we use automated workflows to help people get richer insights from our data. For example, they can generate visualizations for meetings without spending hours of prepping. Managers can tap into relevant metrics in real time and display complex data in a simple way. We’ve made CRM Analytics available from smartphones too, so staff have insights at their fingertips whenever they need them.

Martin: It helps the sales and marketing teams to be more aligned and to work smarter, without being highly skilled around analytics. Automating data capture and embedding it in workflows is changing the way we work. Being able to accurately calculate the ROI for each marketing campaign means we can find out the most effective ways of generating leads, for example. We give customers a classification between A and D – A and B are high-potential customers, and C and D have lower potential. CRM Analytics helps us to visualize where we put our most valuable resources and urges us to focus on the right customers – it’s not cost-effective for our sales reps to be constantly visiting customers who only purchase one small piece of steel from us, it eats into our profit margin. When we visualize the number of visits and the revenue from the visited customers side by side, we understand why visiting the right customer is so important for the first time.

Martin: It helps with upselling and opening new revenue streams. We’re working on forecasting workflows to help sell services as well as products. If a customer buys steel, they may need to send it back to us for a heat treatment. With CRM Analytics, the sales team is proactively notified about those customers and can follow up at the right time to offer those services and send a quote. 

We also recently released a dashboard for product managers. We developed a new product line for engineered products – so we’re not just selling the raw materials and services, we can actually sell components that are ready to use. The team came to me and asked if there was a way to track the new product line, so I created a real-time dashboard to give them 360-degree visibility. Now they can see quotes, orders, product information, customer interests, behavior, and even feedback in one place. Previously, they were capturing that in spreadsheets and charts, which made it complex to analyze.

Martin: Real-time insights are already helping us protect our competitive edge. People understand they can use data to get actionable insights, and they can see the impact that has on our business goals. We’re planning to onboard more users – for example, one dashboard used by sales reps is integrated with a telephony solution to give them analytics during a call. Other teams could benefit from that. When working with analytics has become second nature to our staff, we’ll be looking at Einstein artificial intelligence. I don’t want to overwhelm my colleagues with too much change at once, so we’ll mature our existing dashboards, increase adoption, and then plan the next steps.