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DCNE, a leading HVAC distributor in the Northeastern United States, has served residential and commercial markets for decades. With a reputation built on deep product knowledge and trusted contractor relationships, the company has long delivered responsive service across the region. However, as customer expectations shifted and competition intensified, DCNE realized its legacy tools could no longer support efficient sales operations.
At the time of engagement, the company relied on a basic internal website with no centralized system to manage quotes, contacts, or communications. Sales teams created and tracked proposals manually, using disconnected tools that offered little visibility or coordination. These fragmented workflows created operational bottlenecks, limited oversight, and slowed decision-making.
To solve these challenges, DCNE partnered with AlphaBOLD to implement a modern CRM platform tailored to its quoting and sales processes. Within just a few months of rolling out Dynamics 365 Sales, the company began seeing measurable results. Sales reps are now saving an estimated 8 to 10 hours per week thanks to structured task management, centralized communication tracking, and simplified quote packaging. Leadership also gained real-time visibility into sales performance and pipeline activity. This rapid impact highlights how the right CRM strategy, aligned to business needs, can deliver both immediate gains and a scalable foundation for future growth.
The Challenge
DCNE faced several operational barriers that slowed down sales cycles and limited performance visibility:
- No centralized system: Sales teams relied on a basic internal website that made it difficult to track interactions or collaborate across departments.
- Lack of efficient bidder management: While some version control existed, it was limited to manual tracking in text fields, making it hard to manage revisions and relationships effectively. Contractors and contacts were applied in freeform fields with no structured connection to bids. This made it difficult to trace changes, associate records with specific opportunities or quotes, and maintain a single source of truth, leading to confusion and poor data management.
- Disconnected data: Sales data was spread across tools and folders, making it difficult to monitor pipeline health, measure rep performance, or understand customer engagement. As a result, follow-ups were missed, and sales velocity was hard to assess.
- Limited reporting: Leaders had no real-time visibility and had to rely on manual reports, making forecasting and strategic planning slow and reactive.
Sales reps managed their day through emails, spreadsheets, and sticky notes. Without a centralized system, information was spread across multiple tools, which made coordination across teams more difficult. Managers did not have consistent access to pipeline insights, making it harder to identify trends or respond to shifting priorities. The result was a fragmented environment that created additional administrative effort and limited transparency across the sales organization.
The Solution: Dynamics 365 Sales and Power Platform
AlphaBOLD deployed a CRM solution built on Dynamics 365 Sales that aligned with DCNE’s sales processes and quoting needs. The implementation emphasized configuration over heavy customization, using out-of-the-box capabilities and low-code tools to accelerate delivery while maintaining flexibility. Wherever possible, AlphaBOLD focused on adapting native features to fit DCNE’s workflows, then layered in targeted enhancements to address specific operational challenges. This approach ensured the system could scale efficiently without unnecessary complexity.
Key solution elements included:
- Centralized CRM for opportunities, accounts, contacts, and email history
- Automated key components like routing and packaging logic to reduce manual overhead.
- Integrated communication tracking for sent and pending proposals
- Role-based dashboards for real-time insight into team performance and bid activity
- Custom product and manufacturer tables to track competitive market trends and product adoption.
- A user-friendly interface that shortened onboarding time and improved daily productivity
The new system enabled DCNE to transition from disconnected quoting practices and fragmented data to a connected, intelligent sales platform, with improved traceability, email automation, and centralized record management.
Tailored Enhancements That Drive Impact
DCNE’s transformation extended beyond CRM setup. AlphaBOLD developed targeted enhancements to address high-impact operational needs:
- Custom Quote Package Structure
Built custom fields and logic to support structured quote generation by linking contractors to quotes, simplifying proposal delivery, and improving consistency. This reduced time spent manually organizing quote components and locating related documents, contributing directly to weekly time savings for reps. - Enhanced Product and Manufacturer Tables
Leveraged Dynamics 365’s product table to manage key equipment data such as product IDs, units, and families. Reps could now associate equipment with specific quotes and manufacturers through structured fields, enabling quick lookup, accurate reporting, and reduced time spent toggling between external documents and internal notes. - Role-Based Opportunity Management
Implemented role-based access and dashboards that allow reps to manage opportunities independently while giving leadership centralized visibility. This streamlined approvals and decision-making, cut down on email coordination, and helped reps prioritize active deals without relying on status check-ins. - Bidder Communication and Email Tracking
Enabled teams to track bidder communications using project timelines and the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook. Proposal emails could be linked to specific opportunities and bidders, with delivery status including opens and clicks recorded. Teams could also schedule proposal emails with attachments, improving visibility and eliminating communication gaps. - Role-Specific Dashboards
Built custom Power BI and Dynamics-native dashboards for sales managers and executives. These dashboards track real-time performance KPIs, engineer output, and bid activity. Additional refinements are ongoing to align with evolving reporting needs.
These enhancements enabled DCNE to shift from a fragmented, manual process to a connected, efficient sales environment. By reducing time spent on low-value tasks, the sales team could focus more on client engagement, strategic quoting, and opportunity management, all supported by a system tailored to how they actually work.
Implementation Challenges and Resolution
Like many legacy-to-CRM transitions, DCNE’s project involved change management hurdles. The sales team had long relied on manual methods and was initially hesitant to adopt a new system. AlphaBOLD addressed this by conducting role-specific training and designing dashboards that reflected daily workflows. Rather than forcing reps to adapt to the system, the system was adapted to fit their routines, minimizing disruption and accelerating adoption.
Another key challenge was data consolidation. Without a CRM, DCNE’s data lived across spreadsheets, email threads, and shared folders. AlphaBOLD worked closely with DCNE stakeholders to validate, clean, and migrate this data into Dynamics 365.
Finally, aligning product-level quoting with manufacturer-specific logic required multiple working sessions to map real business rules into the system. These working sessions ensured the final solution was fully aligned with how DCNE sells and supports its HVAC lines.
The Results
DCNE saw clear business value shortly after implementation. The Dynamics 365 Sales solution was successfully delivered, with the most significant impact being reduced administrative workload across the sales team. Reps now save an estimated 8 to 10 hours per week across the eight-person team.
This time savings comes from structured task management, centralized communication tracking, and simplified quote packaging. This shift has allowed the team to focus more on revenue-generating activities and less on manual coordination.
Other key outcomes include:
- Better timing with scheduled follow-ups: Dynamics 365 introduced scheduling features that help reps release key communications, including proposal details, at the right time. This ensures better coordination across sales teams and keeps deal progress on track without relying on back-and-forth emails.
- Improved visibility: Sales managers and executives can view real-time performance metrics, track bid status, monitor engineer and sales rep output, and identify pipeline trends across sales reps and engineers.
- Enhanced customer engagement: Email tracking, contact history, and account-based communication logs allow reps to follow up more effectively and maintain stronger client relationships.
- Streamlined task management: Using Dynamics 365 Sales dashboards and project timelines, users can easily track tasks, notes, and upcoming activities related to specific projects.
- Stronger forecasting: Leadership can now rely on system-generated data to make accurate, data-driven decisions, replacing outdated manual reporting with reliable sales projections.
These early results show how targeted CRM enhancements can deliver immediate, measurable value by reducing inefficiencies and supporting more strategic sales execution.
Strategic Impact
DCNE’s adoption of Dynamics 365 Sales marked more than a technology upgrade. It represented a strategic shift in how the company manages opportunities, engages clients, and scales operations. The system delivered immediate time savings and long-term value by reducing manual work and centralizing key sales processes.
The sales team now starts each day with a clear view of open opportunities, quote statuses, and recent communication activity. Reps are more focused and proactive, spending less time on administrative tasks and more time moving deals forward. Sales leadership benefits from real-time visibility into performance, allowing them to identify trends, allocate resources effectively, and guide strategy based on accurate data.
Building on this foundation, DCNE partnered with AlphaBOLD to launch an ongoing Power BI initiative to deepen performance analysis. This effort uses data from Dynamics 365 to track opportunities, bids, and sales activity across roles, regions, and manufacturers. The dashboards deliver weekly and monthly summaries, trend analysis, and product and customer segment insights. Supported by robust data modeling and transformation pipelines, the solution is helping decision-makers plan more effectively and stay ahead of market shifts.
“With AlphaBOLD, we found a partner willing and able to make smart recommendations that helped us steer efficiently through the development process, building the structure we truly needed, not just what we thought we wanted at the time,”— Jesse D. Lewis, Engineering Sales Support Manager, DCNE
Why AlphaBOLD
From day one, AlphaBOLD approached the engagement as a strategic partnership, not just a technical implementation. The team worked closely with DCNE leadership to understand business workflows, identify key blockers, and deliver a solution that balanced fast wins with long-term scalability.
As a Microsoft partner with deep experience in Dynamics 365 Sales and Power Platform, AlphaBOLD aligned the project with Microsoft’s best practices and roadmap. Its phased approach, proactive communication, and user-first delivery ensured adoption and results.
“Working with AlphaBOLD was a refreshing, eye-opening experience. Their team worked hard to understand the complexities of our business fully and delivered a Dynamics 365 Sales solution that fit our needs and gave us room to grow. We’ve seen major improvements in managing opportunities, tracking market variables, and staying focused on targets above the din of routine. And customers have taken notice.”
— Jesse Lewis, Manager, Engineering Sales Support, DCNE
DCNE’s transformation shows how modern CRM solutions can help achieve real operational value in traditional industries. With centralized tools and AI-ready infrastructure, DCNE can scale faster, support its dealer network more effectively, and deliver an exceptional customer experience.
