CRM implementation with a multi-company setup

An IT group with eight competence centers and complementary services had one or two salespeople per center, plus one overarching sales lead for the larger projects across the centers. We introduced and implemented an Odoo multi-company setup in which every sales lead sees the projects of their own competence center, and the overarching sales role sees both the individual and the cross-center projects in order to support and manage them. Alongside that ran a go-to-market trajectory to fill the pipeline.

Every competence center had its own customers, its own sales method and its own way of following up. There was collaboration at project level, but commercially the centers functioned as separate silos. Customers had several points of contact, offers and price structures differed per entity, leads were spread across several systems and there was no integrated view of the pipeline.

The consequence hit both sales and governance. Complementary services were not sold together, because nobody had the full picture. And forecasting at group level was a sum of estimates from eight sources, which means there was nothing to steer on.

The setup starts from one principle: visibility follows the role, instead of opening everything up to everyone.

After the transformation revenue was roughly ten percent higher and the cost base per FTE came down, while forecasting became reliable enough to actually steer on. Projects ran faster and more consistently, and collaboration between the centers went through one way of working instead of eight.

The most important effect is harder to capture in a number. The group gained one commercial face to the market and one truth for the board, without the competence centers having to give up their independence. Whoever wins a deal no longer has to weigh up whether to bring in a sister entity, because the system shows what there is to gain.

This pattern shows up in every organisation that looks like one whole from the outside but internally consists of several units: a group with subsidiaries, a holding with labels, an agency with disciplines that complement each other. As soon as more than one entity sells to the same market, the same three questions come up.

We do not start with software. Every trajectory starts with a screening: interviews on site with the people who do the work, a mapping of the process as it really runs today, and a prioritisation of what should be tackled first. Only then do we determine what gets built, how big it gets and in which order it is rolled out. The most expensive mistake in this kind of project is building a tool around a process nobody has properly mapped out.

In a multi-company setup that weighs twice as heavily. The technical configuration is the smallest part of the work. The real design sits in the agreements about ownership, visibility and who wins which deal.