From Issues to Competitive Advantage ... One Rep's Story
When I look back on what my goals were for my business, I have to say we’ve made huge progress – and I have to say that RepMaster has been a key factor in that progress. We have been able to differentiate ourselves as market leaders in customer service, we have out-performed our competition – and it all shows clearly at the bottom line.
• My reps get far more face time with the customer – because now our reps
- can efficiently assemble a professional bill of materials and seamlessly email it to the customer
- can quickly track customer activity and focus their time on the customers that really count
- can time manage our projects in a more efficient and effective way
I like the fact that we can close more business because of the tools we have to assist in tracking outstanding bids and expediting job follow-ups – and we estimate that the increased time with customers has allowed us to grow our revenues by close to 40%.
• Commissions have become a non-issue.
- Our system determines what each rep’s share of a project should be based on his/her impact on each piece of equipment sold – commission disputes have all but vanished.
- Our reps can check commissions expected, earned and due at any time – with detail and accuracy that gives them so much confidence that it has resulted in much less time wasted on the part of the reps.
- There has been a drastic reduction in the time spent by our accounting department to prepare the commission statements.
• Our supplier relationships have never been stronger.
- We now can easily assign supplier quotas to our reps and track the results. Our reps now take a much more active role in meeting supplier quotas and as a result we do a much better job at meeting our numbers.
- Supplier forecasting is now automatic and built into our system, so that, when asked, we can quickly and clearly communicate how much work we have in design and how much work we are chasing.
• Every day I get a great picture of how our business is doing at a 50,000 foot level – and I can easily track performance, of my reps and of my project managers as well as of customer activity.
• We needed something to keep us from letting things slip time-wise or fall through the cracks
- RepMaster has pro-active reminders that prompt us to follow up on many things, from late shipments to late payments, from deadlines for bids to outstanding service requests, from shop drawings follow-up to equipment releases.
- The best thing is that it’s a unified system – everybody uses it – so it’s easy for me to follow and it’s easy for someone to step in to pinch hit when needed – it has really paid off when we’ve had people leave.
• We are now very pro-active in expediting our deliveries – and in billing our customers without waiting to be billed ourselves – and then in improving our collections.
- Our system has pro-active reminders to bill based on shipments made – and the billing function is so easy it doesn’t go undone.
- We can and do track follow-up ‘calls to make’ – and we keep a history of calls made so we know who said what when and whoever is following up knows what happened in the past.
These steps have improved our cash flow substantially – it saves us approximately $100,000 / year.
• Our customer satisfaction is way up – judging from the substantial drops in both complaints and our need to respond to customer follow-up calls – there’s less for customers to call about because we have been so pro-active in getting the job done for them ... and so I can relax a lot more … now that has been priceless!
• We wanted to reduce our ‘islands of information’ problem – now we don’t even have one. We really have saved thousands of dollars per month, and far more in frustration – and the sharing of information among people in our various departments really has paid off handsomely.
RepMaster has allowed us to realize huge payoff from our ‘continuous improvement’ initiatives – it’s been a real boon for us.