Buffalo Computer Graphics’ Journey to Successful CRM Adoption and Customization

How can you ensure that your team gets the most out of your CRM investment?
Let’s explore onboarding,
adoption, and customization strategies of one Insightly customer.
In this episode of Closing Time.
Thanks so much for tuning in
to Closing Time, the show for go to Market Leaders.
I’m Melinda Prescher, senior director of product and customer
marketing at Insightly CRM and Unbounce.
Today, I have the pleasure of hosting another special Customer Spotlight edition
of Closing Time.
Please welcome our guest, Anastasia. Dorsheimer of Buffalo Computer Graphics.
Welcome to the show Anastasia.
Hi Melinda.
Great to be here.
Anastasia, to kick things off, please tell us a little bit
about Buffalo computer graphics and how you got started with Insightly.
BCG is a small technical engineering company.
We’ve been operating since about 1982.
We’ve been building a legacy in kind of three areas.
Incident and emergency management software.
Maritime software and hardware.
And that’s maritime simulation software and hardware, and then custom
engineering industries.
We got started with Insightly
when I was tasked with the project to, find a new CRM system.
Our previous
system was really kind of at end of life.
And there wasn’t great adoption of the system as well.
So it was really not an effective tool for our team.
I couldn’t just really dive into finding replacement software.
But I had to first kind of understand the challenges
of, regarding usage and adoption first.
Because a tool is only as good as it’s adopted
and used by the teams that use it, with that.
So I kind of jumped in and did,
operational analysis of the stakeholders
and, who were essential kind of in our full customer cycle.
Really listened to them.
Understand their process, the pain points that they were having,
while kind of identifying some gaps and some core functions that we needed.
I then like, collated all that information and began
searching for a tool that would be a good match for a small company.
We’re in a really niche industry.
And we’re very project management focused operationally.
So I needed a tool that would be a centralized
information hub for multiple teams to use.
And we needed much more reporting
and data visualization than we had with our previous tool.
We really, really love dashboards and metrics here.
So that was definitely one of our focuses.
Additionally, part of my job is that I co-lead
information security at BCG.
So, data security is always an important factor.
When I have to look at it towards the software vendors.
what led you to choose Insightly?
When I started researching CRMs, with the features
and security that I was looking for,. Insightly checked a lot of boxes.
we were looking for.
Also in budget.
That was digestible for my executives.
So it quickly rose to the top of our options With ease of use,
the robust, library of support documents, YouTube videos,
along with Out-of-box features included and the customizability.
when we decided Insightly was our top choice, we started exploring
the additional tools that come with the Insightly CRM,
or around the CRM that Insightly provides.
We’re a small company, so having tools that interface
with each other helps streamline task load, and it’s always a good thing.
So, in the end, we decided to go with Insightly All in one,
which has the marketing, the CRM,. App Connect and CSM in one package.
Fantastic.
So I’d really love for you to share more about how Insightly has helped you grow.
So it was really important to me and for the rest of the team that we
were working with a company and a tool that understood the larger project
that we were trying to achieve when we partnered with them.
Since our prior CRM was not as effective tool for us.
We were essentially starting from scratch.
We were building you
SOPs around the software as well.
At the same time, we were kind of configuring things with Insightly.
I appreciated and I really still appreciate
that Insightly did discernment with us regarding what goals we were trying
to achieve, with implementation of the system,
and really dug into identifying our workflows,
our automation.
The configuration values that were important to us
in the emergency management side of the business,
we have a similar approach
with our customers when we onboard them for our software.
So working with a company that had similar values regarding working
for their customers successful adoption was kind of really refreshing for us.
so Anastasia, I’d love to have you do a little bit of a deeper dive
on customization and the impact that it has had on your business.
I could probably talk about customization, for this entire podcast.
And my love of the customizability and the ease to achieve that customization.
But I’ll try to keep it condensed for the listener.
We were able to take the
base out of box tools and really make them our own.
I need to give a special shout out here to our Insightly team, Josh, Angie,
Erin and, Joanna, who have been instrumental in guiding, advising,
teaching us, during the onboarding go live process and post go live as well.
We shaped the objects and fields and automation,
much more to suit the needs of the various processes and flows
that, flow through the different types of workflows in our business.
One of the challenges of finding a good CRM for us is that we don’t
approach sales in the same traditional way that other companies do.
A lot of our sales come through RFP bids,
which come through a variety of different procurement portals.
Purchase platforms like GSA.
And most of our customers are local, county or federal government
that also require understanding grant funding requirements, government
compliance requirements, government security requirements,
and a variety of disaster recovery requirements, to name a few.
This is a lot of varying details to capture per customer to track and know.
With that.
So the ability to be able to customize and really build fields in that allowed
us to put the data, in that we needed that’s important to our customer.
And sales flow is really essential.
So we built a variety of pipelines in both lead opportunities and projects,
along with some testing
and automation to make sure that we captured these necessary, details,
and that stakeholders, had customer touchpoints, the details
that are part of successful execution for the variety of workflows that we do.
With that that idea of that central hub
means that it doesn’t matter where the where the stakeholder
or one of our team members is talking to a customer in the cycle.
It could be a project manager.. It could be me.
We can look in the CRM, kind of get that summary,
and those key details that we need to know
where the last touchpoint was, where, who they last talked to, what’s kind of going
on, and get the temperature of where things are with the with the customer,
so that when we’re interacting with them, we have all the necessary knowledge.
It’s quite often that a customer doesn’t, you know, think, hey,
I’m not talking to a customer support representative, I’m talking to contracts.
But I’m still going to ask that customer support question right there.
Like I just see that I’m talking to someone at BCG.
So being able to do that helps us just universally whoever
or wherever you are and whatever position and role you play in the company,
that you are prepared to talk to the customer,
we can give them the best serve as possible.
So one of the really exciting things for us is that through app connect,
we are also working to integrate our own internal used version
of incident and emergency management product called D-LAN.
Most people know it as D-LAN, with the full name
is disaster LAN but everyone calls it D-LAN for short.
And so we use our own product internally
for our own various operations from development, bug
tracking to some of the customer support tracking that we did.
So being able to, pull some of that information in that
we do in those other systems to have both of our, CRM
and CSM tools exchange, that information is going to be really beneficial.
And we were really excited when we talked
to the Insightly team about that opportunity.
So we’re working on some of the API stuff that we need to do in our side.
So it’s more of a longer term project,
but it’s really cool that we have the ability
to work with Insightly and our own product together in a partnership
so that we can long term, better serve our customers.
I really appreciate the fact that you give a nice shout out
to our team, because I think our our team is really strong,
especially in the areas of adoption and, and onboarding.
And so I’d love to hear more from you about how you develop energy around,
those processes.
So the teams are really set and ready
to pick up what they need to do to get information into the CRM.
Yeah, I absolutely love the team.
So for us, as we really started to prepare this process, I started with
really listening to our our stakeholders who were tapped to use the tools.
It was key to understanding the operations that flow into those pipelines,
in the workflows and then the human resource bandwidth
for those who need to provide the inputs necessary to make them successful.
Successful adoption of anything requires the people involved to find value
in the tool, get value out of the tool, and then agree to invest their time.
They also need to agree to giving time for new standard operations,
processes and changes to show improved outputs.
You know it doesn’t happen in a moment.
A lot of benefits.. You know, it takes a little time.
With us.
And lastly, because we are a small team,. I need to be respectful and aware
of the time and availability, that people have with their current workload.
So I had to be really targeted and cognizant of that.
You know, we juggle a lot of hats here.
We have hard working people and that their time is really valuable.
So our CRM team, which is a joint connection
between the contracting team and the services team, work diligently
to make sure that configuration and customization
choices were done with the consultation and feedback of the teams
involved in the processes and the cycle steps.
And I’m also really grateful that I have a great bunch of coworkers
who invested their time in this project and gave their time and talent
to make it happen.
It would be impossible if they didn’t have that agreement and
get their energy to this.
On top of that, Insightly has been a great partner
with helping guide us through the process, listening to our questions
when we needed some facilitation approach and helping us problem solve.
We were building this essentially from scratch, and
because we are a small company and some of the pieces like marketing
and CSM were never really formalized because we are smaller.
So we’re growing into this new thing.
So it was really helpful to be able to bounce ideas off of them,
hear kind of what are the best practices for these?
Really with that.
And then the last step to successful adoption is training and support.
So I’m a former trainer.
So I really,
know how important good training and then follow up support after that
training is really successful for anybody
to kind of gain a skill or knowledge, with that.
So after kind of being slightly trained, our core admins, including myself,
we then set up internal training classes with our teams to walk them through,
you know, the system. And then,
we did this all
on a series of multiple training sessions with specific topics.
So depending on what your piece to the CRM or the whole insightly
all in one, whether you’re working on the marketing piece,
whether you’re working on CRM, whether you’re working on the CSM,
we kind of really broke it up into what does this mean to you?
You know, to make sure that, you know, if they wanted the general information
of how all the bells and whistles look, we’ll absolutely get that.
But really, we wanted to target focus, and this is what we would like
you to contribute to this and understand how to do that.
So Kim, who works with my little department of two.
There’s only two of us, and there’s a little contracts
and compliance department.
She has been quintessential to the success of this adoption.
So she’s also a trainer.
We worked together at a different company as well.
And she really spearheaded training, managed
most of the configuration and, work that we did on our side
and has been really tenacious about collecting feedback,
providing additional training to people who may need some extra support,
and help collect, you know, Q&A as needed.
So she is really our insightly specialist.
I’m second in command when it comes to that, but, she I could not,
you know, talk about the success of this project without really giving her
a shout out as being a superstar who drove this project.
And on top of that,
she also created this amazing internal library of help
and operational process documents, which is a lot of what we do in
our lane is very well operational document for the company.
In this beautiful library she built out,
it has like links to, you know,
our own kind of internal process documents that are necessary
for the customizations that we put into the system
that are probably not the standard things, but also has links to and Insightly’s
help desk, the YouTube channel and of course, the podcast.
I love it, and I love hearing how thoughtful you all were about
making sure that people knew what was in it for them, essentially.
And then also, your points about how you’re really thinking about
the future and how Insightly can help you build and grow
as you continue to build your business and build your processes around Insightly.
I think all of that is really important, and those are two really key
call outs here.
All right, Anastasia, that’s all the time that we have for this episode.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
And if our audience has any other questions about your company,
where can they find you?
They can find us at buffalocomputergraphics.com.
Wonderful. Well, thanks again so much.
Your insights were really incredible.
Well thank you for the conversation, and thanks for having me, Melinda.
And thanks to everyone for tuning in today.
Remember to like this video, subscribe to the channel and ring the bell
for notifications so you don’t miss a single episode.
We’ll see you next time on closing time.