Premium Power’s mission in life is to help companies throughout the country access high quality petrol engines, petrol powered products and generators at an affordable price.

The company was formerly part of Parkland Products, but two years ago the businesses were split into separate entities. Premium Power is the smaller of the two, with its staff managing a database of 1,800 customers and prospects, which includes 600 active customers.

With just a small team driving towards an ambitious five year growth target of 22% per annum, the ability to quickly and easily analyse the market through in-depth customer information was crucial to Premium Power’s Manager Paul Moulton.

“As a small company we wanted to minimise our marketing costs. To do this, the staff needed a system that allowed them to efficiently send targeted product information to current and prospective customers. In return we wanted insightful quantitative and qualitative feedback to ensure our marketing campaigns achieved real cut through,” says Moulton.

“Our technology partner, Complete Solutions, has worked with us for about five years so knows our business well. They strongly recommended we move to Microsoft CRM, so after evaluating the benefits we, in effect, piloted the system with Premium Power, before looking at deployment across our larger company, Parkland Products.”

Complete Solutions’ John Biggs could see the importance of Premium Power using Microsoft CRM for business growth. “For any company in sales, the customer information and management that can be gained through Microsoft CRM is critical, so we strongly recommended Premium Power use Microsoft’s CRM development as soon as they could,” says Biggs.

Easy integration
Premium Power operates on a stand alone server, Microsoft Small Business Server- Premium Edition, which includes Microsoft Exchange Server. It has also used Microsoft Solomon as its ERP for many years.

The capability of Microsoft CRM to integrate with the company’s existing Microsoft IT infrastructure was identified as one of its key benefits.

“Integrated Microsoft technology definitely allows for cost effective IT installation and easy on-going management. Microsoft CRM is incredibly intuitive, so was simple for us to integrate it with the other Microsoft technologies within a month,” says Biggs.

Paul Moulton agrees with the integration benefits. “For CRM to be of the most value, all staff need to use it and keep it up-to-date. It needs to be easy-to-access and easy-to-use.

“In the past, we had to log into a separate system to get customer data, it needed to be synchronised and not all staff had access. We never used it like we should have, because there were too many barriers to access.

“Complete Solutions has integrated the Microsoft CRM into our existing technology, so it ‘hangs off ’ our Microsoft Outlook. This new gateway means access is really quick, making it extremely easy for all our staff to access the information they need.

“Everyone has a view of the new system, including our rep based in New Plymouth, who can access it off line and take the information with him on his laptop.”

Moulton adds that the Microsoft “look and feel” is another reason for strong staff uptake. “Microsoft CRM is very intuitive, and how you navigate and search within it is familiar to the staff, as they use Outlook at work, and many use Microsoft products at home.

“This intuitive nature and look and feel, also helped keep our implementation costs down, as we needed little training. It was a short learning curve.”

Measurable benefits
The benefits to Premium Power have been immediate and measurable. “Because of CRM, we are being proactive, rather than reactive, in creating sales growth” says Moulton. “For example, we decided to target hire companies to grow our generator business. We bought a hire company database, threw it into CRM, and used it to email special offers. We could then use it again to monitor the feedback and the type of response. We now know how people want to be communicated to and what products they are interested in, so our sales team can follow up and convert the expressions of interest into sales.

“We also now have an understanding about the hire company market, and have managed to build up a significant business in that sector from nothing. We achieved this much quicker and more cost effectively than we would have had we door knocked or taken pot luck at trade shows.”

“There is no question that the investment has been money well spent.”

Upgrade options
As John Biggs points out, “Premium Power can easily take advantage of any increased functionality, as the product enhances. If they had waited even a year they would have missed out on critical business information. The Software Assurance licensing structure also means the company can gain from upgrades for two years at no cost.”

And as for Parkland Products, Chris Todd is keen to roll it out.

“Parkland is a significant business, and we know it would benefit from Microsoft CRM. The company has 30 PCs, with 45 people, including remote staff, who would all use Microsoft CRM,” says Todd. “The project at Premium Power has been a great way for us to test CRM, and it is clear that it’s the best way for us to grow both our businesses.”

For more information
www.premiumpower.co.nz

Microsoft Business Solutions CRM
Anne Frith, 09 362 5865
askdynnz@microsoft.com

April 2005

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Paul Moulton, Manager, Premium Power