Yocum Oil Case Study

Yocum Oil Fuels Sales, Marketing and Customer Service Capabilities with Cloud CRM

Yocum Oil Company, Inc. (Yocum Oil) is a leading supplier of fuel, lubricating oils, gasoline and associated services in the greater Twin Cities area of Minnesota. A family-owned company for more than 50 years, Yocum Oil has been serving customers in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa with testing and consulting services, fuel additive packages, and residential and commercial heating oil, fueling, and lubrication products and services and retail convenience centers and car washes,. The oil distributor provides 24/7 availability and service support to more than 6,000 commercial and residential customers, with approximately 200 employees operating from multiple locations.

Situation

For several years, Yocum Oil used a legacy-based solution along with Excel spreadsheets to manage customer data but really lacked a centralized CRM solution to record customer and prospect interactions, track follow-up activities, manage sales forecasting and reporting, as well as manage and execute marketing programs. As the company continued to grow and expand their business, they determined that their existing legacy system was not meeting their requirements and looked to implementing a more robust CRM solution. Yocum Oil ultimately selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Solution

Yocum Oil knew that they wanted a cloud vs. on-premise CRM solution to alleviate the need of purchasing new hardware or hiring additional IT resources to manage CRM. "We evaluated several different cloud CRM solutions including Salesforce.com and Oracle, but chose Microsoft Dynamics CRM due to the familiarity our team has working with other Microsoft applications, as well as the skill set PowerObjects brought to the table. We were impressed with PowerObject’s professionalism, disciplined approach, and uncanny ability to understand and evaluate our needs. After considering all the options, we found that Microsoft Dynamics CRM would best align with our business needs and goals," said Lauren Carlstrom, Marketing Manager with Yocum Oil.

Within just 60 days, the PowerObjects team implemented and deployed a cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution across the entire organization including sales, marketing, operations, finance, and customer service.

As a value-add in working with PowerObjects, the company also received PowerObject’s PowerPack modules free of charge. These modules, PowerEmail, PowerDashboard, PowerSurvey, PowerView, PowerEdit, and PowerFax, extend and enhance the functionality of CRM for the company. "We love using these tools and find them to be great enhancements to CRM," said Carlstrom.

Key Benefits

"Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a great fit for Yocum Oil. Having a centralized database of customer information has empowered many aspects of our organization," she added. From a sales perspective, the company has greater insight into customer and prospect information as well as better visibility into the sales pipeline, giving staff and management the sales intelligence they need. "Before Microsoft Dynamics CRM, our customer and prospect information was disparate and unreliable. Our sales team didn’t have the account-level visibility that they now have. Even if they are on the road, they can login and know exactly what’s happening with their customers and have the real-time data they need to sell and service their customers and prospects quickly and easily," said Carlstrom.

From a marketing standpoint, Carlstrom has experienced great benefits from the CRM solution. The marketing team now has the ability to efficiently run targeted mailing and email campaigns, something that was very time-consuming to execute before. "Using CRM, we can quickly segment the data, pull lists, and execute multi-platform campaigns. Our overall campaign execution time has been reduced by 75%, enabling us to do more marketing in less time and better track the results and ROI," she said.

In addition, because they now have better visibility into customer information, sales, customer service and marketing now have greater ability to reach more contacts, develop better relationships and ultimately keep customer retention rates higher.

Overall, Carlstrom believes Yocum Oil has realized substantial benefits from CRM. "Thanks to PowerObject’s guidance and expertise, our staff is much more empowered and productive in their roles. We now have all the information at our fingertips to do our jobs more efficiently allowing us to make better decisions and serve our customers more effectively, ultimately giving us a competitive edge in the market," she added.