Tension Corporation | emfluence Marketing Platform

Tension Corporation, incorporated in 1886, is a multi-national family business that spans both industries and generations. Today, it enjoys a modern, multi-channel sales and marketing technology strategy that helps it run targeted campaigns and adapt to changing market conditions. But just a few years ago, the organization lacked a clear CRM (customer relationship management) strategy where processes were managed differently by individual business units.

The Challenge

With three divisions and facilities across the US and in China and Taiwan, Tension’s account executives had relied for decades on a mix of siloed spreadsheets and email contacts to track their sales funnels. One division—Envelope & Print— has a 30- erson sales team and is an industry leader, creating mail pieces that include not only the envelopes but also the printed products that go inside them. Its Packaging & Automation division builds and designs sophisticated automated systems for the ecommerce and pharmacy industries.

Even with dozens of talented salespeople and a large book of business, the company made its first investment in marketing automation technology in 2017. The marketing team purchased the emfluence marketing automation platform to improve its outbound marketing, and quickly adopted it for regular, customer facing emails and social media scheduling.

Soon after, the platform’s uses grew to address some customer management opportunities. The need developed first in the Envelope & Print division, recalled Kaitlin Graham, the CRM and Marketing Manager at Tension Corporation.

“We were using emfluence as a really basic CRM to track trade show attendees and to work with our sales team to see who the customers are. It gave marketing an avenue or viewpoint into customers before the CRM system,” she explained. “Before, we would capture leads at trade shows and then email them to the sales team with a request to please follow up. Then we had no visibility. emfluence gave us a lot more.”

Tension Corporation was using emfluence primarily as an email platform in the early phases and the team was realizing benefits. But without a connection to the sales force automation capabilities of a CRM, there were major opportunities to improve their processes. They were dealing with incomplete data and asking salespeople to work without insights into the best leads and the latest customer information.

Embracing a CRM Mindset

Prior to adopting Microsoft Dynamics, the company’s sellers had, in effect, built their own personal CRMs, typically using customized Excel spreadsheets. Two salespeople had found Outlook to be a pseudo CRM system.

“The notes in an address book would have 10 years of history! That’s valuable information that is not very easy to share,” Graham said.

According to Graham, there were several top reasons that Tension wanted a CRM:

Track leads and opportunities in the pipeline
Give salespeople and leadership visibility into customer activity
Improve tracking of leads from above the funnel to closed
Succession planning in the event of sales team retirements or departures
Preparing for an additional level of marketing capabilities
Responding to the speed of business, moving faster for customers

Broadly speaking, the company’s leaders recognized the need for a CRM to improve lead and opportunity tracking, enabling the team to more accurately forecast their sales pipeline. Additionally, preparing for retirements was creating a larger opportunity. The marketing team, including Graham and the VP of marketing, focused on finding a solution that could build on the benefits they already experienced with emfluence.

Marketing and sales worked together to build a business case over the course of a year, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. They noted the progress the organization had already made with marketing automation and how it could improve further. Graham and her marketing VP were convinced that adopting Dynamics 365 would open a wide variety of new lead gen opportunities. They also had plans to drive even more leads through emfluence and into CRM through channels like a new blog, social campaigns, and other digital activities.

However, it took some convincing of leadership. After an unsuccessful attempt at implementing CRM years earlier, Graham and her team had to be sure they could lay out the benefits of CRM despite the upfront and ongoing costs. But the strengths of the solution eventually won out.

“We went with Dynamics because it fit really well with the rest of our technology platform. It was able to integrate with emfluence, and worked seamlessly with Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft products.”

Planning for Success

When Tension began the Dynamics 365 CRM implementation process, they faced the challenge of collecting the company’s data from spreadsheets held by different salespeople and sales support personnel. As she looked at the data, Graham also discovered there was a lot of duplicated information coming from the salespeople, as the team frequently worked with the same contacts and prospects.

Graham found that there were also organizational hurdles. The sales reps were protective of their customer lists. Some had worked with Tension for more than 20 years and had a strong sense of ownership of their clients. Building trust would be critical with key users.

“Make the system a safe space for your team,” she advised. “Give them a space they can’t make mistakes in, like a demo or training environment and know you will need to spend one-on-one time to reinforce the material.”

And she found that executive sponsorship of the initiative helped smooth the transition.

“Management support is critical for any implementation, but make sure you have it and that they are walking the walk as much as they can,” she said. “Having leadership use the systems in their conversations with their teams is a key indicator that the company is serious about making CRM work for them.”

Finding New Levels of Performance

Today, Tension has a streamlined system that synchronizes contacts between Dynamics and emfluence no matter where the data originates. But the path to this streamlined approach required a series of steps.

The company started small, importing marketing lists directly into emfluence. Now, using the landing page capabilities provided by emfluence, the marketing team can nurture new contacts and feed the right information into the CRM. What started as a process of salespeople manually updating lists is now largely automated, with new leads in CRM triggering alerts for salespeople that include better data and insights.

The marketing team also leverages marketing lists in Dynamics to upload lead lists from trade shows. Then, through the integration with emfluence, they can trigger automated workflows that send the right series of follow up communications.

“It’s very seamless for us, and especially for our sales team,” Graham said.

To get the most out of trade show investments, the company is also using the contact score within emfluence to help determine which marketing leads should be elevated to sales qualified leads. Using custom contact scoring models, the right contacts can be synced with a field or fields in Dynamics, giving sellers the best possible information.

“Our biggest focus with CRM right now is contact scoring, email engagement, and continuing to build our funnel with Microsoft Dynamics. Coming back from a trade show and seeing how our emails performed is really powerful,” she said.

Continuous Improvement

Graham advised that organizations should prioritize process management if they want to get value from integrating emfluence and Dynamics 365.

“Define your process and know it before you use these tools,” she said. “I really enjoy working with both Dynamics and emfluence, but just implementing these tools will not solve the issues of your processes.”