Woodward: Supporting Lifelong Customer Journeys with Sugar and Sugar Sell

Woodward, an industrial manufacturing company with a history of over 150 years, has always strived to deliver high quality products and excellent customer experiences. What started as a more efficient water wheel governor manufacturer is now a company that supports airspace and automotive manufacturers, such as Boeing, Airbus, and Caterpillar. With 42 offices and employees across 13 countries, the company primarily focuses on designing and delivering energy control solutions that its partners count on to power a clean future.

What we'll Cover:

Products for Life, Customers for Life

Woodward not only aims to support its customers and partners towards a greener future, but it also manufactures components with incredible lifecycles—sometimes over 90 years. For the company, delivering proper support for all parts throughout the lifecycle is unquestionable. The company needed the right tools and tech solutions to aid the process.

Before collaborating with Sugar, Woodward used Salesforce as its main CRM solution. In time, this proved to be not only a costly solution but a solution that hindered their ability to deliver the support they aimed for their lifelong customers.

SugarCRM: A Straightforward and User-Friendly Solution

With nurturing and growing the most strategic accounts as their primary goal, Woodward started to research solutions that would better fit their needs: affordability, user-friendliness, robustness, complexity, and scalability. In the end, the manufacturer selected Sugar’s Sugar Sell. Apart from Sugar’s involvement in implementation and deployment, Woodward focused on critical employees’ help in advocating for the solution.

“These individuals understood what they can get out of maintaining information in a tool like Sugar versus Excel and SharePoint and Outlook; I would have those business members discuss the process with the rest of the team and ensure the tool works for them.”

– John J., IT Business Systems Manager, Woodward

Excited about Sugar Sell’s potential, Woodward started exploring its customizations. One highly anticipated feature of Sugar’s solution was the new fields to help predict the potential revenue for each opportunity over the next 10 years. The feature helped Woodward carefully evaluate and prioritize opportunities that would have benefited from more time and effort. Another highly-appreciated feature that Woodward heavily leverages was its’ ability to capture in-person customer visit details.

A Glimpse Into the Future at Their Fingertips

While in the past, only a select few could use Salesforce due to its high cost. Nowadays, everybody at Woodward can leverage Sugar Sell’s visibility and transparency. This allows the manufacturer to better anticipate customer needs and proactively respond.

“Before, it was hard for us to get a feel for our data and know if we were chasing after the right opportunities. You don’t want to dwell on these things for months. Now, with good, updated data, it can be pretty clear which opportunities bring the biggest return on investment. We can make decisions faster.”

– John J., IT Business Systems Manager, Woodward

SugarCRM: Supporting Woodward’s Growing Ambitions

Woodward’s improved ability to proactively respond to customer needs translates into better, more innovative customer support and the lifelong customer relationship they aim to achieve.

Today, Woodward has completely ditched manual double work, spreadsheets, and scattered data. Everything lives in and is accessible from Sugar’s user-friendly interface. With real-time, holistic visibility, Woodward now moves faster and smarter, making it possible for its team to provide efficient, lifelong customer support and fulfil its vision of a greener world.

You can access our Woodward Case Study here to learn more about Woodward’s success story. Or, if you’re interested in how a CRM could help your manufacturing business, check out our CRM + ERP: Connecting Back-Office and Front-Office Operations infographic.

Mihaela Chiurtu As a Marketing Content Writer, Mihaela is passionate about branding, content strategies, and customer interactions. When outside the office, Mihaela is a Netflix binge-watcher, skincare geek, and music lover.