How Aventics Built a Strong CRM Foundation

Have you been following along with the Aventics story? Aventics, is one of the world's leading manufacturers of pneumatic components, systems, and customer-specific applications. In a nutshell, they do pneumatic engineering to provide products and services for industrial automation. They engaged with Fullscope on their CRM initiative a couple years back, and I've really enjoyed watching their story unfold.

In case you've missed them, we've recently shared a couple articles including Aventics Partners with Fullscope for Successful CRM, and How CRM Changed Business at Aventics. Now we'd like to touch on another couple keys to their project foundation and ultimately success with CRM− end to end reviews (ownership plus mapping) and training.

Larry Bowers, the Global CRM Project Leader for Aventics, and I were talking about how initiatives like these are an evolution. An evolution of getting where you're going, so it's not really ever done. In our conversation, Larry hit on a couple of really important concepts for the core team, and for leadership, to understand how they need to be engaged. The ownership piece is big. If you don't understand that going into a project, it's going to be difficult, because it's critical to how you get where you're going. We were talking about and challenging ourselves on what we could have done a little different or better, and we hit on the concept of the end-to-end review. Below, Larry talks about that and how important it is to put focus and attention on that.

When I look back on the project and critique myself (I'm probably my worst enemy in these scenarios) I think we should have done more to incorporate the end-to-end review. I know now we that we did not take full advantage of the guidance provided to us by Fullscope and that we should have taken more time to drive this topic home when we first kicked-off our phases. We already knew we had a significant challenge in front of us given the multiple languages and cultures we had to contend with. 

The end-to-end review is a vital component to properly develop training videos, documentation, and overall process clarity. We clearly understand now that following this concept would have saved us days of time and confusion we experienced after the rollout. 

My advice to future rollout teams: Take a break, go back to the end-to-end review, and make sure that every process is known. Define ownership for every process, and make sure that these are known and agreed upon both within the project team but most importantly within the organization.  It is especially important to address all processes from Lead qualification to how the Dashboards are used and consumed. 

One of the other things we talked a lot about initially was how important training was to user adoption. Yes, it's absolutely criterial that managers lead by example, but also, getting users comfortable and educated on how to use the tool. We planned to roll out training to the team and mapped out how it was going to work. We did a lot around this, so let's hear from Larry his thoughts on training:

We knew from past experiences / failures that there hadn't been enough training during our past CRM attempts. Although we had a very competent CRM Administrator there just wasn't enough of her to go around. Our organization is constantly changing and we find we spent a great deal of our time adapting the CRM system to evolve with the organization and very little time training. 

We also considered implementing a "Power User" concept but found that developing and sustaining competence for 50 trainers was just not going to work for us. Fullscope's video based training concept (along with a good end-to-end review) provided a clean solution to our dilemma.   Their concept allowed us to focus on smaller, reusable training video sessions that we could deliver to multiple countries, in multiple languages, and in an efficient and meaningful way.   

Listen into the video below where Larry discusses what they focused on to make training a successful tactic in CRM user adoption.

Training was Key for Aventics CRM

For more tips on training success, check out this article How-to Avoid CRM Failure: Have a Training Plan or contact us. .