Customer success story
They integrated before the training, not after
Most CRM projects install the system, train people, then connect the data. Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen reversed it. Every invoice, order and customer was already inside Salesforce when the first training session began, so the sales reps opened the system and saw their own accounts. Adoption was complete within days.
Ole Lynggaard Copenhagen designs and makes high-end jewellery, selling across Denmark, Norway and Sweden and exporting to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Benelux and Australia. It runs Microsoft Dynamics NAV for orders, invoicing, production and administration, QlikView for reporting, and Salesforce for sales. Rapidi has connected NAV to Salesforce since January 2011, moving roughly 370,000 invoice lines a year alongside customers, orders, items, prices and supplier data. The house was established in 1963 by goldsmith Ole Lynggaard and is still family-run: his daughter Charlotte, a goldsmith and designer like her father, joined in 1992; his son Søren took over management in 2003; and Charlotte’s husband Michel Normann became commercial director in 2006.
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The CRM that nobody used, again
Before Rapidi, Ole Lynggaard had Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It was not being used, and its data was inconsistent with what NAV held. Implementing it had already been costly in time and resources, which is the worst combination: expensive and ignored.
The company decided to move to Salesforce, which meant it needed an integration to NAV. Salesforce recommended Rapidi.
The initial conversation with Rapidi was enough to convince me that Rapidi was the right integration partner.
What happened in that conversation is the whole story. After a discussion, they decided to do the integration first, before implementing Salesforce, and before the user training. As Hansen puts it: “We have not regretted that!”
Why the order matters
The usual sequence puts training in front of an empty system. People learn the buttons on demo records, then go back to their desks and find nothing they recognise, and the CRM becomes a place they are told to update rather than a place they want to look.
Ole Lynggaard loaded the history first. All of it: invoices, invoice lines with product detail, and sales statistics, transferred in advance so the system was populated before anyone was taught to use it. At about 370,000 invoice lines a year, that initial transfer took a while, but it ran automatically in the background while the project got on with other things.
Then the training happened, and the reps found their own customers waiting for them. Hansen describes watching it: the sales people adopted the system almost instantly, and the sessions turned into active discussions about how to get the most out of it rather than how to operate it.
“It was very obvious that these good discussions were a result of the ability to see their own data inside the system,” he says. “They had their own customer’s invoices and their own customer orders which they knew and could work with from the very beginning. After the training the system was used from day one.”
Fast to build, too
The first integration, customer information, was running within a few hours. The whole implementation went step by step, and after three days every integration point had been tested and was ready for production.
Salesforce’s own account executive for the Nordics put a sharper number on the first piece of it.
Rapidi did an amazing job in the Ole Lynggaard Project. They did the initial Salesforce CRM to Microsoft Dynamics NAV integration in just 3 hours. The customer couldn’t believe this was possible. Rapidi really is the “go-to integration partner” when needing integration between Salesforce CRM with Microsoft Dynamics NAV or Microsoft Dynamics AX.
The integration service is very mature and stable. It witnesses of a very well-proven technology and professional way of doing things at Rapidi. The integration was set up quickly and it just works!
What runs, and how often
Customer data synchronises in both directions, hourly. Open sales orders, invoices, credit memos, items, pricing and supplier data all flow from NAV into Salesforce.
The volumes are worth stating because they explain the scheduling. Around 7,000 item numbers. 24,000 invoice heads and 370,000 invoice lines, synchronised nightly. 67,000 sales order lines, also nightly. Customer data every hour, because that is the thing a rep needs current.
Take it with you
The whole story as a PDF
Seven pages: the CRM nobody used, why they integrated before the training, the volumes, and Hans Kurt Hansen in his own words. Yours after one short form.
One customisation is worth singling out: payment reminders sent by the finance team are visible inside Salesforce. A rep about to call a customer can see that finance has already chased them, which is exactly the sort of thing that goes wrong when two departments work from two systems.
Chatter is integrated through Rapidi as well, and the company uses it internally for success stories, PR and marketing tasks, and updates on accounts and contacts.
The result
The goal was to give sales people a tool worth using. Measured against the CRM that preceded it, that was achieved: they actually use Salesforce, and they like it.
Hansen credits two things. The data in Salesforce is accurate and refreshed every hour. And the integration went in before the training rather than after.
I would absolutely recommend Rapidi. The system is very quick and flexible. Until now I have all my wishes fulfilled and the support is only an email away.
He adds a compliment that is really about method rather than software: Rapidi is one of the few vendors he knows that take their time understanding your exact needs and concerns. On this project, that is what produced the sequencing decision that made the difference.
The change in the reps’ day is worth spelling out, because it is the part that compounds. Before the integration they phoned head office to find out anything about a customer, and adding a new client meant filling in a form, faxing it to the office and waiting for somebody to be free to type it in. Now they enter the customer themselves and can start entering that customer’s orders immediately, without waiting on a colleague in headquarters. They also see detail they would not have thought to ask for, from anywhere, whenever they want.
That makes the CRM system very powerful to work with. We have gained a more efficient work routine as we gather important information from one single system.
It has also spread. Salesforce started with around 10 to 15 users and now runs with about 40, well beyond sales: marketing uses it for email campaigns and for uploading advertisements, insertion schedules and PR articles; logistics uploads delivery schedules for new products and coordinates shipments to the shops; procurement uses it too. Because the data is consistent and current in one place, every department found a reason to use it. The next step is to integrate the website with NAV and Salesforce, again with Rapidi.
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