HSO enables Sony Europe’s marketing to advance at speed and scale with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys
Sony’s Microsoft platform transformation supports thousands of marketing activities and improves customer data quality by 10x.
Executive Summary:
HSO has advanced Sony Europe’s growth ambitions by helping the company transform its marketing operations. Experts at HSO enabled Sony Europe to use Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys to accelerate customer journeys across hundreds of marketing campaigns. This was part of a wider project that saw Salesforce and Marketo replaced by Sony Europe’s in-house Dynamics 365 Sales implementation and Customer Insights – Journeys with Power Platform, implemented with support from HSO.
How can you change your marketing tools at speed, especially when a business-critical event is coming up fast? Sony Europe found a way—with expertise from HSO.
Challenge: Sony Europe faces growth vs complexity
Part of Sony Group Corporation, Sony Europe wanted to target greater growth and innovation in its diverse B2B and B2C markets.. But its sales and marketing setup was disjointed, creating friction, delay, and siloed workflows. This held back forecasting, lead management, and scalable customer engagement.
“We needed to act as one business, respond faster with leads and approvals, and capitalize on cross-sell opportunities,” explains John Lingham, B2B CRM Platform Manager, Sony Europe.
“We needed to remove all the noise—and focus our sales teams on genuine leads to drive growth”
Reasons to replace Salesforce and Marketo
Sony Europe used Salesforce for CRM, Marketo for marketing automation, and SAP as the system of record for sales.
Over time, this fragmented landscape led to major pain points:
Data sprawl and governance: The business had 150 web forms in multiple languages. Hundreds of fields were added, many of them optional and inconsistently populated. The same customer could end up with four or five different entries.
Sales and marketing silos: Alignment was an issue. Salesforce and Marketo were operated separately. Leads were captured inconsistently, nurturing differed between teams, and handoffs often lacked clarity.
Barriers to growth: Quoting, forecasting, and approvals were slow and time-consuming as teams dealt with inconsistent data.
“We needed to remove all the noise—and focus our sales teams on genuine leads to drive growth,” says John Lingham.
But the clock was ticking. Sony Europe wanted a new solution in time for the upcoming International Broadcasting Convention (IBC), one of the biggest events in its sales and marketing calendar. IBC attracts thousands of global broadcasters, content creators, tech developers, and equipment makers.
Solution: Sony Europe selects Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
Sony Europe decided to replace Salesforce and Marketo with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights – Journeys with Power Platform. This would enable integrated and scalable sales and marketing operations.
“We were already using Microsoft tools, so it made strategic sense to simplify platforms and standardize processes,” explains Promeeta Chandra, Business Partner for Corporate IT, Sony Europe.
Sony Europe had already delivered the Sales Hub implementation in-house. But with the IBC event approaching fast, the company needed expertise in implementing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys and getting the best from the solution.
That’s where HSO stepped in to help, offering the deep solutions know-how that earned the 2025 Global Microsoft Partner of the Year for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights.
Delivery: HSO collaborates closely with Sony Europe
HSO worked as a single team with Sony Europe stakeholders to deliver Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys, providing strong governance and communication.
Acting quickly, HSO helped Sony Europe to:
Understand and maximize out-of-the-box capabilities.
Improve processes instead of replicating legacy workflows.
Use Microsoft FastTrack to align with Microsoft standards and best practices.
“Right away, we could see HSO’s deep knowledge of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys. They asked the vital questions: What's your core business? What are you trying to achieve? How are you structured? HSO broke it down, making it far easier for us to understand. That's where the value came through immediately.”
HSO implements solution at speed
HSO got the core functions of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys up and running quickly. “This gave us a chance to see how it performed, run real-life test cases and proof-of-concepts,” says John Lingham. “Once we were comfortable, we could really leverage the complexity with the different components we use today.” The joint HSO and Sony Europe team worked together to:
Build more than 100 forms across seven languages
Deploy reusable templates and clear definitions of leads and contacts
Orchestrate journeys for multi-channel marketing campaigns and events
Change management proves essential
HSO helped Sony Europe’s employees adapt to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys and get the best from the solution after years of using Salesforce and Marketo.
Around 25-30 professionals were involved initially from four business groups and a central support team, ahead of onboarding other colleagues from Sony Europe’s consumer business.
“It was a challenge,” says John Lingham. “The difference between the tools was so stark. But HSO supported us, providing recommendations on how to pilot the project and manage different requests, which had a positive impact.”
Knowledge transfer builds self-sufficiency
HSO delivered training and shared insights, enabling Sony Europe to go live and grow internal expertise.
The HSO team provided Sony Europe with:
Extensive user walkthroughs, training, and coaching.
Formal handover process and documentation.
Upskilling for internal teams, including offshore resources in India.
“HSO went above and beyond with knowledge transfer. This wasn’t just about how things worked, but how we could develop the solution in future. This has proved critical for where we are today.”
Key benefits: Sony Europe drives growth
Across Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights – Journeys, Sony Europe reduced custom data attributes by 79% compared with Salesforce and improved overall data quality and accuracy by 10x.
Sony Europe can distinguish between marketing engagement and sales qualifications. Elapsed leads reduced by 84.7%, improving overall pipeline health
Sony Europe has used Customer Insights – Journeys to support over 200 campaigns and thousands of marketing activities in year one.
Now we can avoid spending hours making sense of customer data, freeing up more valuable time to focus on genuine leads. It’s been a huge shift for us. And as our knowledge increases, we’re trying out new modules and functionality to take us to the next level.
Door opens to AI capabilities
Sony Europe is also keen to explore AI opportunities within its new sales and marketing platform. “AI is certainly on our roadmap,” says Promeeta Chandra. “We’re keen to see what’s possible and we are looking at what Copilot can do for us. It’s an exciting time for the business.”
Discover more today
Are you ready to offer more engaging customer experiences? Find out how HSO can help you unify data with real-time journeys in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
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