Atradius Collections gains more lead conversions with Oracle

Atradius Collections, a global leader in trade-invoice-collection services, provides solutions to recover domestic and international trade invoices. The company handles more than 100,000 cases a year for more than 14,500 customers, covering 200-plus countries. It wanted to support growth in trade-credit insurance activities for its customer base, which includes midsize, large, and multinational organizations in diverse sectors, such as logistics, chemicals, aluminum, construction, and textiles.

A key goal was to standardize and streamline customer- and trade-invoice management activities for businesses where, in 70% of cases, the seller and buyer reside in different countries. In addition, the company needed to gain a single, up-to-date view of each client’s interactions across all countries to maximize service quality and grow per-customer revenue by offering relevant, incremental trade-invoice collection and/or credit-insurance solutions.

In addition, Atradius wanted to cut its typical six-month sales cycle, boost lead-to-sale conversion rates, enhance forecasting accuracy, and improve the productivity of sales and front-office teams. It also hoped to evolve processes to meet new customers’ or market needs rapidly and without the need for additional infrastructure investment.

Oracle Sales was implemented in only 11 weeks in the Netherlands and Belgium by Oracle Diamond Partner Infosys working with experts from Oracle and IT managers at Atradius Collections. The company anticipates that it will achieve roll-out to other countries within an even faster period.

"Going live in 11 weeks was a tremendous achievement," said Sonja van Haasteren, global customer experience manager, Atradius Collections. "The outstanding support provided by Oracle and Infosys during the implementation and the fact that no customizations were needed made this possible."

After migrating to Oracle, Atradius Collections Increased sales team productivity by more than 10% in nine months by automating previously manual processes for lead generation, forecasting, and territory management for trade-invoice collections with Oracle Sales.

The company grew lead-to-sales conversions and increased upsell opportunities by replacing fragmented, incomplete knowledge repositories with a single, central customer record accessible to all sales, marketing, and customer support staff members. Also, Atradius was able to streamline sales cycles using Oracle Sales to score and rank leads for quality and integrity and to pass validated leads to sales representatives according to their industry expertise, knowledge of the client, and geographical location.

Using Oracle Sales, the company could track the lifecycle of sales leads from inception to closure, as well as optimize the allocation of leads and management of opportunities in each geographic region, using Oracle Sales to model territories and determine the most effective coverage of sales areas.

Atradius Collections increased sales forecasting accuracy by replacing spreadsheets with Oracle Sales's automated tools and custom-embedded analytics to determine likely future revenue for the next month, quarter, year, and beyond. The company also created monthly dashboards for line-of-business managers and analysts and enabled them to track changes and model what-if scenarios.

Using embedded intelligence tools in Oracle Sales, the company identified the highest-performing salespeople, most-profitable types of customers and industry sectors, and countries with the strongest growth potential. Additionally, Atradius began rolling out the solution in 17 other countries, including Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, and the United States,