CRM expertise and value-focused best practice drive partner growth

As the 2024 Microsoft UK Services Partner of the Year and a Microsoft Business Applications Inner Circle member, ANS has developed a comprehensive Dynamics 365 customer relationship management (CRM) practice with consistent year-over-year revenue growth. This success has been driven in large part by a highly effective pre-sales, implementation, and managed service teams, which ANS supports with continuous investment in training. Commitment to skilling has allowed the partner to recruit and cultivate Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), and these expert resources are invaluable when it comes to solving business challenges and building customer confidence. “Investing in our technical resources, such as paying for courses, giving all team members time for development days, and being an education academy in our own right has been key to the evolution of our Dynamics 365 practice and technical pedigree,” said David Vukomanovic, Sales Director for Business Applications at ANS.

Another key contributor to growth is the company’s evolution of its sales practices to focus on the value that Microsoft Dynamics 365 can deliver to customers. ANS works with customers through its defined navigator approach, a toolset aligned with Microsoft best practices that provides a deep dive into customer requirements to build a tailored business use case and justification for projects. “We’ve been able to sharpen our approach with a combination of proprietary tools and third-party solutions to quantify the value that an organisation can gain from the Dynamics 365 platform for a desired business outcome,” added David.

Move from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 supports strategic goals

One customer that has benefited from the experts at ANS is LRQA, the leading global assurance partner that provides assessment, advisory, inspection, and cybersecurity services to more than 61,000 clients in more than 150 countries. The organization was running two separate instances of Salesforce and one instance of legacy Dynamics 365. It and wanted to centralize under a unified CRM to better support its sales teams. “We are on a digital transformation journey that requires continual improvement and wanted a one-stop shop CRM that could bring our four teams together to help us be more proactive,” said Stuart Kelly, Chief Commercial Officer at LRQA. “All of the behavioral changes that we wanted to implement to advance our sales organization further and keep pace with our markets were better supported by Dynamics 365.”

ANS' proactive approach to understanding the challenges at hand and responsiveness in bringing its experience and expertise to the table were critical in making this shift to a unified CRM possible. “We knew this was going to be a big lift, and it comes down to the right product, the right team, and the right support network in terms of people like ANS to drive that forward with us,” said Stuart. The move to Dynamics 365 will help LRQA support its strategic goals around relentless client focus, market-leading revenue growth and being digital. ANS architected the solution around Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Navigator to centralize CRM, introducing process automation to reduce administrative burden and improve seller productivity while also increasing client engagement. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights was added to create visibility into the end-to-end client experience and provide intelligence around client satisfaction along with anticipating future needs.

“Dynamics 365 is going to help bring colleagues together across the world, in how we think about our clients. Our teams will be able to see in real time what's happening across that client base with a single view of each customer, it will make it very easy to know how to approach a conversation or a request for information. It is also going to facilitate onboarding of any acquisitions we make, helping bring new colleagues up to speed very quickly,” said Stuart.

The Dynamics 365 deployment was completed in Q1 2025 and the LRQA team already has plans to augment the solution with more advanced Dynamics 365 capabilities, including the benefits of Microsoft Copilot generative-AI features. “Selecting Dynamics 365 was a forward-thinking decision. The evolving development of Dynamics 365, including how it is using AI, is going to allow us over time to replace a lot of the ancillary software and services we have in place,” concluded Stuart.

Continuing to grow with Dynamics 365

Like LRQA, ANS also sees the potential to embrace new Dynamics 365 technologies to continue building practice growth. In addition to supporting Copilot role-based agents and offerings, the partner is excited about incorporating the newly released Dynamics 365 Contact Center into its services portfolio. “We are convinced that customers can realize major gains in productivity and profitability by leveraging generative AI within the digital contact center,” said David. “With this offering you can completely transform the services you give to customers. This is going to be a key technology moving forward.”

"We knew this was going to be a big lift, and it comes down to the right product, the right team, and the right support network in terms of people like ANS to drive that forward with us."

—Stuart Kelly, Chief Commercial Officer, LRQA

"All of the behavioral changes that we wanted to implement to advance our sales organization further and keep pace with our markets were better supported by Dynamics 365."

—Stuart Kelly, Chief Commercial Officer, LRQA

ANS helps LRQA move from Salesforce to unified Dynamics 365 CRM