Fixtures & Fastenings
Customer: Olympic Fixings
Site link: www.olympicfixings.com
Gains and benefits
Vecta, the on-line sales analytics and CRM solution, has enabled Paul Gordon, managing director of Olympic Fixings, to spend more time managing and directing his business - rather than chasing data!
Olympic Fixings was founded in 1989 and supplies British and Irish merchants from distribution centres in Accrington and Bangor with over 3,500 catalogued and stocked SKUs. A trusted brand among electrical wholesalers, tool and plant hire businesses, builders’, plumbers’ and agricultural merchants, the Olympic product offering includes all types of fixings, drill bits and blades, cutting and abrasive products, hand tools, sealants and cleaning products. Customers are served by a 20-strong, highly experienced field sales team and can also use the company’s online catalogue that shows their own negotiated prices.
Vecta stores a company’s data in the cloud and is accessible by sales and management teams over the internet. Uniquely, it combines transactional data from a company’s ERP system with customer and contact records to deliver an instant and comprehensive picture of performance, margins and opportunities directly to desktops, tablets or smartphones.
“Our sales team were previously using manual systems to report and record their activity,” said Paul, “so effectively we had no visibility from a CRM perspective. We had recently upgraded our ERP, which enabled us to integrate with a CRM system and so we looked closely at three providers. In addition to the functionality Vecta gave us, we discovered it was also successfully integrated with another user of our ERP system and this proven link gave us extra confidence in its implementation.”
Vecta has revolutionised the ability to capture customer information at Olympic. Paul said, “Before Vecta, the only thing we knew internally about our customers was where to send their invoice! Now we have several thousand email addresses and we’ve been able to engage in direct marketing campaigns to key customer contacts where we send special offers and get orders in return! Previously the only way we sold was through direct selling from the rep, so Vecta has facilitated a more multi-channel approach.”
Results:
- Vecta has enabled multi channel selling with direct mail campaigns resulting in orders by return
- Managers now investigate variants themselves rather than asking colleagues to create reports for analysis
- Vecta delivers link and upselling opportunities, as well as gap analysis and customer branch comparison data
- Variances can be investigated quickly using Vecta’s margin report
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Previously the only way we sold was through direct selling from the rep, so Vecta has facilitated a more multi-channel approach.
- Paul Gordon, Managing Director, Olympic Fixings
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