Powell Software shares real-time deal information with its partners with RowShare

Can you share a short description of your business and your role?

Powell Software, subsidiary of Expertime, is a global publisher of Digital Workplace and Intranet solutions in Microsoft Office 365 environments. Our solution improves the Office 365 user experience. I’m Jean-Pierre Vimard, the CEO of Powell Software, and I oversee sales and marketing.

What business problem were you trying to solve when you became interested in RowShare?

It was the rise of commercial opportunities by our reseller partners. We need to identify which partner contacted us first about a project. It’s a challenge to share confidential information with different companies competing with each other without risking information leakage.
Previously, our partners sent us information about new projects by email, and then we transposed them into an Excel file that shared within Powell Software.
We wanted to improve several aspects of this process: • On the one hand, we wanted the partners to send us more structured information. By email, everyone sent what they wanted and often it wasn’t precise enough. • We also wanted to save time and avoid mistakes by limiting copying-pasting and manual reprocessing • Finally, in both business meetings and when communicating with prospects, we needed access to the most up-to-date information.

How did you hear about RowShare for the first time?

Our two companies are part of the ecosystem of Microsoft partners. We were already in touch about other topics.

Have you considered other solutions?

At first, we explored the possibility of further automatizing the process in Excel, but it was impossible to centralize all the information into the same spreadsheet while preserving the confidentiality of the information of each of our trading partners.
We did of course also consider implementing a CRM, in particular, Microsoft Dynamics. It was rather logical for commercial leads. But our experience in change management and the adoption of collaborative tools discouraged us from doing this. I’ll explain why.
We feel that any information in our CRM must be of very high quality, and it should be ready to be processed by our sales teams. To inform our CRM would, therefore, have required too much work for our partners who would have mostly resorted to sending emails out of simplicity, which we really wanted to avoid. On the other hand, we wanted to give our partners some agility. We needed a ready-to-use, easy-to-use solution that would be adopted quickly.

Why did you choose RowShare over the alternatives?

RowShare brings us a single common repository that is always up to date. In our unique lead tracking table, each partner only sees the information they have sent back to us, but the entire Powell Software team sees all the data from all of our partners.
We can see the entire history of our leads, from the most recent to the oldest. Our inboxes are no longer inundated by multiple messages between colleagues and partners to obtain the most up-to-date information.
When we arrive at a business meeting, we know that our data is perfectly up to date, and our meeting time is more productive. Moreover, upstream of each incoming request from a prospect, we first check if the project has just been replied to by a partner.

How was the implementation? How fast? Did you need help? How was the help?

Since we weren’t yet aware of RowShare, we spent a few hours on the phone with the RowShare team to take advantage of best practices and to create and organize the tables. Since then, we have been autonomous. Now, if we need to add or remove lead qualification criteria for our partners, it’s a matter of one or two minutes in RowShare.

How is RowShare used in your business?

RowShare is used daily by sales, management, and marketing at Powell Software. It is also used by sales reps and executives at our partners who are integrators of Microsoft Office 365 and Powell all over the world.

What do you like most about RowShare?

In addition to saving time and improving the quality of our business information, RowShare brings peace of mind to our partners and enhances our business relationship with them. You can’t put a price on that! As a result, although it is an agile and lightweight tool, RowShare has become a structuring element of our relationship with our partners as well as training, marketing, and events.
As specialists in collaborative solutions, we were also particularly aware of the challenge of adoption: we needed a simple and user-friendly solution because we were not in a position to impose a tool on our partners, which are independent companies.

Would you recommend RowShare?

Yes, of course!