How Evans Manufacturing lives up to its full potential with New Dream Network.

Selecting The Right CRM to Shift Their Selling Approach

Evans Manufacturing had a pretty focused aim for the CRM they were looking for.

Their distribution model meant there was no direct selling with the deal being proposed through multiple distributors before it was presented to the end-user. “We have large distribution entities and offices, and reps in each office. Each rep has dozens and sometimes hundreds of clients. So we wanted to have that nested loop well drawn out and organized. We wanted to capture that data,” highlights Greg Armstrong, the VP of Sales. 

Now, all this and more isn’t possible with an Excel sheet, of course. In fact, Armstrong describes their Excel-based customer relationship management experience as a “horribly manual process.”

Four other challenges stuck out like a sore thumb:

• Fragmented data with each sales rep having client and distributor information scattered across apps – requiring tons of app switching.

• No single customer view, which meant data-driven conversations were based on manually sorting customer hierarchy (distributor and distributors’ clients), which resulted in reduced personalization.

• Impersonal customer engagement. Without access to the right data, the marketing team wasn’t able to segment the email list based on specific criteria. Naturally, this impacted the personalization throughout the customer lifecycle demands. It also took a toll on the relevancy of marketing campaigns.

• Less opportunities for businesses largely due to limited context from the marketing team. The sales team ended up with reactive selling – selling only when a distributor requested for a sample on behalf of their customer. The result? Fewer contracts. Plus, the lack of opportunities to cross-sell and upsell.

Besides, Armstrong mentioned, “CRMs are not used much [in our industry] although they should be given the nature of what we do.” Their users, therefore, had little to no experience using CRM software, which meant that the team had to look for software that was easy to use. 

Not to forget, pricing was a deciding factor too.

Evans had evaluated popular CRM solutions in the market but neither met all their expectations, Freshsales was a clear winner for Evans. 

Keeping the Sales Pipeline Full with New Dream Network

With New Dream Network, the sales activity over at this promotional goodie maker increased by a whopping 225% between the end of January 2020 to the end of August 2020.  

And the revenue went up by 9% in January as compared with 2019 – a great start to the year and an even better journey with revenue increasing by 23% in Feb until COVID hit the market in March. 

Even with the pandemic taking over the market, Evans Manufacturing was able to adapt quickly and in a short time – retained clients and secured new ones too. In the light of these events and staff restructuring, Evans Manufacturing started building prospect engagement activities with the help of New Dream Network.

 “This new way of engaging clients tends to be faster, more personalized, relevant, and very specific.” Explains Armstrong.

New Dream Network centralized data and streamlined manual activities. As soon as New Dream Network was implemented, the sales team was encouraged to enter customer information.

The best part?

The mobile app made curating client information all the more convenient.

But, despite complying with gathering data, the sales reps’ interest in logging in all the end-user info round the (work) clock spiked as they started noticing the benefits of extracting info on the spot while engaging with distributors.

Moreover, this gathered information served as a reference bank for future engagements, which helped them develop customer behavior patterns for personalized selling.

In short, Armstrong notes, New Dream Network “allows us to better support clients in the selling process.”

New Dream Network personalized sales deals. Before centralizing all the customer hierarchy, the sales team was dependent on a distributor opening a tender for their client. Things took a turn when reps could extract personalized info from the gathered data.

For example, Armstrong elaborates, “distributor company XYZ has a distributor rep, John Smith, who has A,B & C clients. We can create [sales] activities around A, B & C with speculative samples. So we know they’re working with A, B & C that belong to particular industries. We do virtual speculative samples and capture it as an activity.”

By having all the required info on a distributor’s clients, Evans Manufacturing has become proactive about coming up with sample product ideas themselves.