A $20B+ global manufacturer and distributor of medical and surgical supplies—serving hospitals, labs, and clinicians in 100+ countries—needed commercial clarity at speed. Instead, an over‑customized, on‑prem Dynamics CRM and a ClickDimensions-driven marketing stack meant fractured data, minutes-long page loads, and forecasting guesswork. Sellers stalled. Marketers flew blind. Leadership lacked a trustworthy pulse on pipeline and ROI.
The Moment of Truth
In Europe, reps waited minutes for a single record to load. Manual imports, broken product links, poor forecasting, and low adoption dragged every deal. Marketing faced the same fog: no Customer 360, no attribution clarity, and zero funnel visibility. High spend. Low ROI. Zero agility.
Two Platforms, One Window
Midway through a Sales CRM overhaul, leadership raised the stakes—Marketing had to modernize too, with the same go-live date. Two platform moves (Sales + Customer Insights) in 3.5 months, work that normally takes 6–7 months each. Miss the window and the company faced a seasonal freeze, rising costs, and another year of siloed decisions. The mandate: deliver both, or delay impact.
The Playbook: FastTrack + SwiftShift + Platform Thinking
Persistent brought Microsoft FastTrack architects, rationalized customizations, and rebuilt Sales on Dynamics 365 using cloud-native integrations (Azure Functions, Logic Apps). A field-first PowerApps mobile CRM and Azure AD/MFA brought secure, anywhere access to 260+ users.
Then came SwiftShift, Persistent’s Generative AI-powered accelerator, to pull Marketing out of ClickDimensions and into Microsoft Customer Insights—fast, clean, and without third‑party migration licenses. Generative AI didn’t replace engineers; it stripped out drudgery so they could focus on decisions, not data janitorial work.
How SwiftShift Made Speed Safe
- Automated Discovery – Reverse-engineers the legacy schema and proposes the target model in Customer Insights.
- Generative AI Mapping & Transformation – Maps fields, applies business rules, merges messy datasets, auto-cleans noise; engineers approve changes.
- Accelerated Migration – Moves thousands of records/minute via Azure-native tooling, with retries, logging, and audit trails.
- Customization Optimization – Flags legacy scripts, replaces them with low/no-code flows or Dynamics-native capabilities; converts needed libraries to .NET plug-ins.
Intelligent Deployment & Validation – CI/CD pipelines automate schema checks, integrity audits, performance benchmarks, and safe rollbacks from test → staging → prod.
What Changed?
- 50% lower migration cost by eliminating third-party tools and leaning on automation.
- 30% savings in ongoing CRM ops spend (license rationalization, simplified infra).
- 30% sales productivity lift across 400+ users with standardized forecasting and mobile-first access.
- 7–8 minutes → seconds for record loads—reps sell, not spin.
- 25% campaign ROI increase in two quarters thanks to real-time funnel tracking and AI-driven segmentation.
- 70% manual process automation across Sales & Marketing using Power Platform workflows.
- 4M+ records and 30–40 complex tables migrated, validated end-to-end with DevOps pipelines.
- Dashboards in seconds, not hours—leaders see pipeline and campaign health live, not in Monday spreadsheets.
Why It Matters Beyond One Company
- MIT Sloan Management Review found generative AI can improve highly skilled workers’ performance by nearly 40% versus those who don’t use it.
Takeaway: Generative AI, governed and wired into your core, isn’t optional—it’s the operating system for modern revenue teams. Speed is table stakes; governed speed is the moat.
The Flywheel Keeps Turning
Phase 3 is underway: AI-powered case routing, SLA management, omnichannel care, Generative AI knowledge bases, sentiment analytics, and real-time service dashboards—on the same Microsoft Dynamics + Power Platform foundation. Sales, Marketing, and Service now share data, AI insights, and automation patterns. One commercial brain, many intelligent limbs.
Where Do You Start?
If your revenue stack is stitched together by scripts, legacy plug-ins, or untraceable spreadsheets, you don’t need another tool—you need a migration you can trust. Don’t pilot Generative AI at the edge—bake it into your core workflows.
Let’s make it real: Halve migration costs with a Generative AI-led accelerator like SwiftShift, define what “seconds, not minutes” should look like for your sellers and marketers, audit your marketing data debt to see how many journeys you can truly personalize, and stand up an AI-governed commercial core that ships value this fiscal year, not next.
