Check out this case study from Incremental, detailing how it helped Stanlow Terminals achieve status as the UK’s first sustainable energy hub.
A newcomer to the green energy market, Stanlow Terminals is aspiring to build the UK’s first sustainable energy hub – reinventing traditional energy assets to manage the logistics and storage of new, cutting-edge bio-refineries and sustainable fuel.
As the UK develops a greener economy and reduces use of traditional fuels, demand for the petrochemical industry will begin to decline. Stanlow Terminals, a subsidiary of Essar Oil UK Ltd, is diversifying the use of oil refinery storage assets to facilitate a green, renewable energy hub. The hub combines logistics and storage to support large biofuel and sustainable energy projects, transforming oil infrastructure into a platform for green energy innovation.
Starting from scratch
Stanlow Terminals has aggressive growth plans to scale-up and become the UK’s first sustainable energy hub. Zara Giles, Chief Commercial Officer at Stanlow Terminals explained, “ We have big aspirations for Stanlow Terminals to be at the forefront of sustainable energy in the UK. Digital technology is key to this.” To support aspirations for growth, the organisation required a robust sales system.
Starting with a new team, Stanlow Terminals had no sales solution in place and instead relied on Excel and Outlook for pipeline management. This made it very difficult to share information on leads and created a time-consuming, complicated and very manual process of tracking results.
A key driver for change was Stanlow Terminals’ need to demonstrate value in order to grow. To secure capital investment, it required a solution that evidenced a robust pipeline, proficient sale processes and projected income. Zara Giles, Chief Commercial Officer said “We needed a solution which could provide visual reporting and demonstrate existing lead-generation activity to quantify our strategy for obtaining third-party revenue.”
Solution
Stanlow Terminal scoped-out a few different systems, but decided on Dynamics 365 due to the seamless integration with its finance system, Dynamics 365 Business Central. Remaining within the Microsoft ecosystem ensured smooth and secure movement of data across the two solutions.
Incremental assessed Stanlow Terminal’s requirements and advised that Incremental’s Dynamics 365 Sales Core Package would deliver an effective solution for now and support ambitions for growth in the future. Incremental’s Dynamics 365 Sales Core Package is an implementation package with no hidden costs, that aims to get an organisation up and running with an entry-level CRM in just four weeks. The packaged delivery meant Stanlow Terminals had timely access to a new solution and could begin to take advantage of an integrated CRM very quickly.
Through the delivery of adoption training, Incremental worked closely with the team at Stanlow Terminals to ensure that best practice was instilled from day one. This training has allowed the organisation to maximise the full capabilities of the solution, ensured a high quality of data in the system and empowered easy adoption for the future.
Zara Giles, Chief Commercial Officer said “Incremental ran adoption training with the wider group after implementation which all users found very useful. We have the recordings of those sessions on file to support ongoing training and adoption for future new starts, which is great.”
Efficient sales pipeline
Dynamics 365 Sales provides Stanlow Terminals with access to customer and opportunity information and with SharePoint integration, centralises the latest version of documentation. The solution helps to progress projects and opportunities faster, as now everyone has sight of all activity, reducing duplication of effort and streamlining leads and pipeline development.
Since the system has gone live, Stanlow Terminal has accelerated their sales pipeline and been able to establish an accurate 5 year business plan, an activity supported by a more efficient sales process with robust reporting.
Greater collaboration
Stanlow Terminals utilises Dynamics 365 integration with Microsoft Teams, augmenting chat messaging with lead information to improve collaboration on opportunities. Using the solutions together enables its engineering teams to feed into the system with internal project information, enriching opportunities with useful data.
The commercial team are also harnessing Dynamics 365 Sales to manage internal communication within the workforce, ensuring key information is shared and the system is being fully utilised.
Demonstrating value
With Dynamics 365 Sales, Stanlow Terminal now have an auditable, end-to-end sales process through which they can evidence lead-generation and pipeline development. The solution provides intuitive, data-rich reporting dashboards which are shared to demonstrate value and encourage internal investment.
Zara Giles Chief Commercial Officer: “Everything ran completely to plan. I could not fault the team at Incremental, they were a pleasure to work with, especially with the project being delivered remotely due to Covid-19.”