One of Finland's largest private employment and workforce solutions companies, Barona struggled to support growth and manage complex operations with a legacy CRM that made it hard to maintain consistent sales processes, gain visibility into data, and deliver seamless customer experiences. To address these challenges, Barona transitioned to Microsoft Dynamics 365, unifying its sales and customer management processes into a single, integrated platform. This shift enabled the organization to standardize workflows, improve collaboration across teams, and establish a centralized source of truth-improving data visibility, sales efficiencies, and customer experiences; while creating a more scalable foundation for growth. Read the customer story to see how Barona approached its CRM transformation and what your organization can learn from its journey.
Why did Barona move from Salesforce to Dynamics 365?
Barona decided to move from its legacy Salesforce CRM to Microsoft Dynamics 365 to simplify operations, unify processes, and support future growth.
Over time, the old CRM had become overly complex, with many unused fields and metadata that made further development difficult. Different business units used different sales and invoicing processes, which led to:
- Siloed data and limited visibility across units
- Manual, time-consuming invoicing work
- Inconsistent lead and opportunity management
- Some teams not using CRM at all (relying on pen and paper)
By moving to Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Barona wanted to:
- Create a single, standardized sales tool for all business units ("One Barona")
- Improve data quality and visibility across the company
- Streamline sales and invoicing workflows
- Prepare for AI adoption with a platform that already includes AI capabilities
The decision was also influenced by Dynamics 365’s alignment with the broader Microsoft ecosystem, its future AI capabilities, and cost-effectiveness.
How did Dynamics 365 and Power BI change Barona’s sales and reporting?
Dynamics 365 and Power BI helped Barona reimagine how sales and reporting work across the organization.
With Dynamics 365 Sales, Barona standardized account, lead, and opportunity management and introduced a unified sales process with shared stages such as qualify, negotiation, order received, and won/lost. This replaced multiple legacy workflows and supported the company’s One Barona strategy.
Key changes included:
- Automated invoicing steps: Sales teams no longer move manually between fields to create and process invoices. A single sales and opportunity process makes moving from opportunity to invoicing faster and more consistent.
- Better cross-sell and collaboration: Salespeople can easily share leads between business units, and teams can see who is doing what throughout the lead-to-opportunity journey. This has improved cross-selling because the full portfolio of services is visible across the group.
- Unified tools and integrations: Dynamics 365 is integrated with HubSpot for automated lead management and Vainu for updated account and contact data.
With Power BI integrated into the environment, Barona now has real-time reporting on:
- Sales pipeline and opportunities
- Invoicing
- Customer contacts and activities
Previously, reporting required choosing the right templates and fields, and reports could easily break. Now, the data is immediately visible and available in Dynamics 365 and Power BI, giving sales leaders clear visibility into where the business is heading from a sales perspective.
What business outcomes has Barona seen from Dynamics 365 so far?
After deploying Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Power BI across all business units in less than five months, Barona has seen several tangible outcomes.
Operational efficiency and standardization
- Unified sales and opportunity processes across four main business areas and several subsidiaries.
- Eliminated most manual invoicing steps, making the move from opportunity to invoicing more streamlined and faster.
- Improved data quality by using a single, standardized sales tool for everyone.
Improved collaboration and cross-sell
- Sales teams can share leads across units and convert them into opportunities more easily.
- Better visibility into who is working on which opportunities has helped Barona use the "power of the entire group" instead of operating in silos.
Better reporting and visibility
- Real-time reporting on invoicing, opportunities, and customer contacts via Power BI.
- Salespeople manage customer contact lists and appointments in one place, improving pipeline visibility.
Enhanced service and AI readiness
- Dynamics 365 Customer Service has simplified internal support by removing multiple queues and enabling faster case resolution.
- Barona is rolling out a mobile app for Sales users and adopting AI tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales to automate routine tasks and surface insights.
- Integration with Outlook helps sales teams keep better track of meetings and customer interactions.
Overall, Dynamics 365 has helped Barona unify operations, increase efficiency, and prepare the organization for more data-driven and AI-enabled ways of working.
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