The S. Sterling Company

Pipeliner CRM Case Study S. Sterling Company

S. Sterling Company of Atlanta, Georgia is sales and distribution firm representing electrical component suppliers to U.S. vehicle and equipment manufacturers throughout a 14-state region including the South, Southeast and Midwest. The company represents highly engineered products to vehicle manufacturers from recreational to heavy-duty. Clients include Airstream, Volvo Construction Equipment, Blue Bird Body Co., and Club Car, to name a few.

From its beginnings in a single Michigan sales office 20 years ago, the company is now headquartered in an Atlanta home office and 10,000-square-foot warehouse facility.

Use of Pipeliner CRM

Pipeliner CRM is the S. Sterling’s central application for the monitoring and controlling of opportunities, from leadLead Lead refers to a prospect or potential customer (who can be an individual or organization) that exhibits interest in your service or product; or any additional information about such entity. to close.

“Before Pipeliner, we didn’t have one spot where one person could watch over what’s happening throughout all the territories”

“Before Pipeliner, we didn’t have one spot where one person could watch over what’s happening throughout all the territories,” says Eric McDowell, National Sales ManagerSales Manager Sales Manager is an executive who leads a sales unit, team or department by setting goals and meeting targets, formulating plans and policies, designating tasks, and developing salespeople.. “Now I do the admin here, and the individual reps all contribute to their pipelines for their locations and for their own specific set of accounts and opportunities. I can fire up my computer, take a look at all the pipelines, and if there’s anything that’s flagged as being past-due in any of the sales sections, I can bring that up as a source of question or comment to our individual sales guys.”

The PipelinePipeline Sales pipelineis a visual representation of the stage prospects are in the sales process.

S. Sterling has a very specific set of pipeline steps that focus strictly on moving opportunities from lead to close. McDowell explains each.

“At the front end, we have sections that are just leads. Those are customers that we’ve had no contact with, either we found them in a publication or you see them at a trade show, and you know, ‘We need to call on this customerCustomer Customer is an individual or an organization that purchases a product or signs up for a service offered by a business..’

“Column #1 is the initial contact with the customer. Either we’ve called somebody, we’ve emailed, we’ve reached out to them and we’re waiting on something to happen.

“Column 2 is a meeting, which can be in the form of a face-to-face meeting or it can be over the phone. But you actually talk to somebody then.

“The 3rd column is action. So coming out of that meeting, the assumption is, there should be something we have to do. They have to get a sample, you’ve got to find some specs on a part, you have to respond to the customer with some sort of an action.

“Column number 4 is “Quoted.” Keep in mind we are a sales company, so in order to get to a PO you have to have something to close, which for us is a quote. We’ve gone through and we’ve provided them a price on whatever the customer is looking for.

“Then stage 5 is ‘PO Placed.’ That’s all the way through. That’s the ‘win’ stage.”

The Search for the Right CRM SolutionSolution Solution is a combination of ideas, strategies, processes, technologies and services that effectively helps an organization achieve its goals or hurdle its challenges.

McDowell’s search for an efficient CRM application began when he realized that there was a major situation in his company regarding opportunities.

In fact prior to Pipeliner email was the only method of tracking sales. “Everything was done manually, through correspondence in emails,” McDowell says. “It worked for 19 years, but I couldn’t see us going forward and not having something like Pipeliner.”

The Test Drives

McDowell spent considerable time finding the right CRM. “I spent like about 6 to 8 months test driving a lot of the CRMs you hear of,” McDowell relates. “Everything from ACT! to Salesforce to Sugar CRM to Insightly. I tried to give myself a span of everything from the established big players all the way down to the new ones that were free.

“I found that a lot of the established players, like Salesforce, they gave you tons of features but,  number one, it was a lot more expensive than what we needed. Number 2 is that it was very rigid, and we needed something very flexible because our business model is a bit unlike, say, a large corporation. We need flexibility.”

On the other end of the scale—freeware—McDowell found that creating an efficient CRM was too much work.

On the other end of the scale—freeware—McDowell found that creating an efficient CRM was too much work. “For the Insightlys and what-have-you, the stuff that’s for free—you had to put in a lot of effort to make it resemble anything that’s workable.

“I was looking for the balance of something that was kind of in the middle, something that had a good backbone to it, had a good outline to the system, but something that we could tweak and make it work within our company.”

Focus on Pipeliner

McDowell found Pipeliner through a web search. “I think the number 1 thing that got me to evaluate it were the reviews,” he says. “I had read some online reviews that were pretty favorable. Then the test drive was very easy—getting into it just to try it out.”

He was also very impressed with the support he got long before he even purchased. “I tell you what, the sales folks, the support folks—even before the sale, and afterwards—have been absolutely wonderful to work with.”

As McDowell was testing various CRM solutions, he had specific criteria he was using to evaluate. “Number 1, it had to be something that wasn’t cumbersome,” he relates. “I found that if I allowed myself 30 days to test-drive a system, if I found myself after a couple days going, ‘Argh! I really need to start looking at this CRM system again.” That right there was the big sign for me that, if I don’t like it, salespeople are definitely not going to like it.

Implementation

What finally decided McDowell on Pipeliner as S. Sterling’s CRM? “The ease of the customization was one of the biggest factors,” he answers. “We’re a small company so we don’t have an in-house IT person, so it was going to come down to me to make this thing work. If I could get into it knee-deep, figure it out and be able to explain it to the other sales guys, and I was able to get to that point in very short order, then it became a no-brainer for us.”

McDowell was pleasantly surprised by how easily and rapidly he was able to get up and running with Pipeliner.

McDowell was pleasantly surprised by how easily and rapidly he was able to get up and running with Pipeliner. “We got the licenses, and we basically brought the guys in for a 1-day training seminar. Within that 1 day were able to explain the benefits, the features, and how it works. I got it all loaded into their own individual laptops, and they were off and running.” Reaction from salespeople has been great. “So far response from salespeople has been very, very positive,” McDowell says.

“I think they have seen that since early on, taking a few minutes to create the opportunity on the front end makes your job a whole lot easier as your carrying it through the sales processSales Process Sales Process is a series of strategic steps or a set of activities aimed at driving sales growth through the alignment of personnel, market insight, methodologies, relevant business units, and technology..” McDowell also discovered early on how much of a benefit Pipeliner’s flexibility can be. “We’ve actually been able to tweak a few things on the run,” he says. “When we go into an opportunity, we need to be able to tie it back to a specific principal or specific productProduct Product refers to anything (an idea, item, service, process or information) that meets a need or a desire and is offered to a market, usually but not always at a price. group, so that later we can run management reports centered around those 2 main things.

“We figured out about a month-and-a-half into it that the way that we were setting up our opportunities didn’t afford us that. It took me literally about 15 minutes to make a change in the system. Now they basically have drop down check-boxes that they can check that let me go back in and run reports based on how they set up an opportunity.”

Change to Company

McDowell makes a very simple statement of the positive change Pipeliner CRM has brought to S. Sterling Company. “The biggest change is visibility,” he says. “Right behind that would be accountability.

Everything ties together very nice. It’s not cumbersome in the least.

“It’s really the ease of use—I don’t know how else to put it. It’s very userUser User means a person who uses or consumes a product or a service, usually a digital device or an online service.-friendly the way that you set up an opportunity, add the contacts to the opportunity, and then start managing that opportunity within your activity calendar. Everything ties together very nice. It’s not cumbersome in the least.”

Recommending Pipeliner to Others

McDowell has ended up highly recommending Pipeliner as part of his job. “Part of the benefit Pipeliner has brought is that I’ve been able to go to the companies that we sell for—our  principals—and show them the Pipeliner system that we have implemented. I can show them that it’s a value scenario, that we’ve invested in a CRM system such as Pipeliner, that’s going to benefit them in the long run. So I’ll say, “Let’s spend 10, 15 minutes. Let me show you what we’ve done.”

“Inevitably I get the same questions. Number one, they want to know ‘How expensive is it?’ When I explain to them that it’s not expensive, they’re surprised. Right behind that is, ‘How easy is it to customize?’ I show them examples of how easy it is to customize. Then when I show them the reporting that’s available out of the system, they’re additionally surprised because that’s the benefit to them; that I can accurately report to them what we’re doing for them.”