DESCON
Case Study
Apptivo boosts the Bidding Strategy of Descon Engineering Limited
About Descon
Descon Engineering is a Pakistan based multinational conglomerate started in 1977, with a vision to create Pakistan’s leading Engineering Enterprise. With a strong belief towards achieving the extraordinary, Descon has become a pioneer in the development and manufacturing of industrial process equipment and piping spools with its advanced team of experts. Descon defines versatility with its strong foothold in Power and Chemicals industries. At present, Descon has extended its global presence across the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Iraq, Egypt, Kenya, and South Africa. The Descon Technical Institute improves the livelihood of underprivileged youth with technical education as a part of its Corporate Social Responsibility.
Challenges before Apptivo
Descon is a customer-centric organization that bids and delivers projects on multiple sectors like Engineering, Chemical, and Power. Primarily, the company employed Spreadsheets to have a record of all biddings and reporting. As several types of processes are involved from different Business Units/ Divisions in the bidding to diversified sectors, the company found it difficult to maintain proper documentation on leads, opportunities, conversion rates and were unable to keep track of each bid separately. Also, the company found it quite challenging to align visits and organize bid reporting from different Divisions.
How Apptivo Simplified Descon’s Bidding Process
Apptivo CRM Software integrated with Office 365 assisted Descon in building an efficient management system for bidding. While the Customers App and Contacts App provided the platform to manage their customer database, the Leads app helped to keep track of their potential prospects.
The Opportunities App played an important role in streamlining their entire bidding process. Apptivo implemented an effective sales process for Descon that helped them to track each bid leveraging Apptivo’s interactive dashboards. Descon utilized most of the key features of the Opportunities App listed below to structurize its bidding process.
Important Configuration
- The important shortcoming in Descon’s bidding process was that the forms were to be filled manually with no proper checks. Apptivo upgraded Descon’s bidding process with automated forms that collect, update, and modify the records according to the business purpose.
- Descon managed their business more efficiently using Apptivo’s ability to create fields and add dropdown options that go along with their bidding process.
- Descon was able to track their sales like never before using Apptivo’s custom view to display the latest forecast of their sales for each quarter with a summary box showing an estimate of the amount for the particular quarter.
- Descon now able to enter planned opportunities for full year and updated status of the same, all planned opportunities are now assigned to salesforce and track accordingly.
- Constructive categorization of their bids was made possible with Apptivo’s flexible grouping system. Furthermore, Descon was able to document the bid’s location.
- Leveraging the different sales stages provided by Apptivo, Descon was able to easily track the success rate of bids.
- Descon enhanced their process by configuring their follow-ups for each visit and generating a report for each opportunity separately with Apptivo’s standard reporting tool.
- Descon was able to effortlessly document and track the Opportunity’s loss reasons and information on competitors from Apptivo’s native dashboard.
The internal communication of the employees became more structured with Apptivo’s collaboration network. They used Follow Ups activity to set reminders for the bids that required a follow up.
During the transfer process, Descon utilized the migration capabilities of Apptivo to move their legacy data from their native system and import them to Apptivo’s corresponding applications. Besides, Apptivo’s team of engineers provided full-blown training along with an easily adaptable ecosystem.
End to End Insights
By utilizing Apptivo’s CRM Software, Descon was able to notice a great improvement in the user experience. The productivity increased which in turn boosted the conversion rates. The company was able to find the errors and strengthen its accuracy in the bidding strategy. In hindsight, the overall performance of the company improved tremendously with Apptivo. Additionally, Descon is now willing to implement Apptivo to their other group companies within their corporate environment.
