Alex Smith |
Lexmark is a global provider of printing and imaging products, software solutions and services that help its customers to save time and money. To date, the company has helped organisations in more than 170 countries to accelerate and optimise their adoption of internet of things technology and digitise the management of printing and imaging devices.
Today’s buyers are changing the rules of the game as they start to expect a stellar and frictionless customer service experience from their product providers. Lexmark has therefore sought to transform its own operations, aiming to streamline and transform sales and reporting processes to deliver services more quickly and accurately. A particular focus was to improve its existing Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) software, which helps sellers quote complex and configurable products but was difficult to use due to Lexmark’s complex product and service ecosystem.
Another issue Lexmark wanted to tackle was the lack of integration between the CPQ system and the customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps the brand to manage, track and store information related to its current and potential customers. Without this integration, there was no easy way for Lexmark’s sales team to visualise and track every aspect of the customer’s journey. To truly understand its customers, Lexmark needed an integrated CRM and CPQ system that could meet the needs of an enterprise committed to helping and growing businesses around the world.
As the Lexmark sales, pricing and IT teams evaluated their existing processes, a few other challenges and areas that needed improvement emerged. For example, the brand discovered that its sales and services teams were leveraging different systems for tracking customer data. Meanwhile, the company’s old CPQ software lacked the functionality to handle reporting, and featured an unintuitive, JavaScript-based interface that was difficult for the sales team to use. Products, services and supplies were also available for sale in a myriad of different combinations, making it significantly harder for Lexmark to predict demand and maintain its inventory.
The company’s leadership team therefore began to envision an integrated approach to sales and operations in order to increase efficiency, ensure a sustainable path to digital transformation and ease the growing transition to remote work. It adopted a meticulous and methodical strategy to evaluate the available options.
“The main challenge we had to solve was the complexity of our requirements,” says François Lourdel-Henaut, enterprise business application front office manager at Lexmark. “We needed a tool that could streamline the process of building configurations, while also helping us track and generate complex reports. As we went through demos, it became clear that Experlogix was the right solution.”
Lexmark chose Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales for its CRM system, selecting the platform due to its robust application ecosystem, flexibility and intuitive interface. After getting a sense of the company’s product configuration and reporting requirements, the leadership team recommended it implement Experlogix for its deep integration with the Microsoft ecosystem and ability to handle configuration complexity. The system features an intuitive interface which keeps products and sales aligned with a logic-based rules engine and automated, efficient approval workflows.
The Experlogix and Lexmark teams collaborated to implement the CPQ system for the sales team, allowing the company to quickly take advantage of Experlogix’s modern interface and integration with Microsoft.
With the new integrated CRM and CPQ system, the sales team can now visualise and track the entire customer journey, from the moment a customer becomes a lead to all the way through their life cycle. Experlogix enables buyers and sellers to deliver highly customised, accurate product and service proposals with deep, native integration to Dynamics 365 for Sales. The system also provides Lexmark with the functionality to handle reporting on an easy-to-use platform.
“The integration capabilities between Experlogix and Dynamics 365 have been a huge help,” says Dawn Smith, enterprise business application front office manager. “Our sales team spends a lot less time copying quotes between systems, and the more modern interface allows us to build configurations much faster.”
The new integrated system has also increased order accuracy, resulting in a 43 per cent drop in quote revisions. The streamlined system has also significantly reduced the amount of time that Lexmark’s sales time needs to provide a quote to a customer. Sales representatives can now build and show multiple configurations more easily using a modern and intuitive interface, providing the customer with more accurate and helpful information when selecting the product that best suits their needs.
In addition to making the quoting process faster and more accurate, Experlogix CPQ provides a guided selling feature. This verifies the accuracy of a quote or order in real time as it is configured by a sales representative, providing intelligent feedback via pop-up messages and colour-coded highlights. It also allows recommendations for add-ons or other products to the help sales team upsell and cross-sell more effectively. For example, when a printer is configured, the system can automatically recommend cartridges, warranties or managed services that will be most relevant to the customer.
“The performance of Experlogix allowed us to get past the limitations of our old system,” says Lourdel-Henaut. “We can easily build multiple configurations and see different feature options in real time. Our reporting has also gotten much easier because Experlogix can handle the complex formulas we use for profitability and other analyses.”
This article was originally published in the Summer 2023 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription