CRM-Enhanced Marketing
Southern States, LLC is the largest switch manufacturer in North America and a rapidly growing player in the SF6 products field. They came to ALTAVI after gaining a dominant position in their market. Their current process had taken them far. They even had a superficial CRM built into their system, but they wanted deeper process changes to reach higher up the tree.
Altavi identified and implemented a number of technologies to optimize the sales process, including Salesforce.com CRM and Revvy CPQ. Along the way, we have worked alongside their team – a collaboration that has helped us to jointly uncover unique opportunities to maximize ROI in the project.
An Emerging Opportunity
It had been identified that a new federal regulation would require Southern States’ utility customers to review equipment and system security robustness and make improvements where needed. The review would have multiple mandated milestones, would require third party verification, and include various approvals along the way. Should any of the mandated steps be missed or not performed to the level required, the company could be fined. Due to the unique qualities of each utility, there would be multiple strategies taken. Marketing automation could only be effective by taking these variables into account.
The Service Division of Southern States was preparing to introduce a new product into the market that was closely tied to new regulation. Dave Lombardo, Director of the Service Division at Southern States, contacted Tom Speas, Director of Corporate Marketing, asking if there was a tool that could be used to actively track the activity of each utility and use that tool to help manage the selling process of the new product being offered. As Southern States utilizes Area Sales Managers working closely with Manufacturer’s Representatives, communication and clarity was very important if they were to be successful cultivating future sales leads.
Just-in-Time Marketing
A key objective was to identify which stage of compliance each customer was in because this would impact the sales strategy. The finely tuned system would optimize resource usage (Manufacturer’s Rep and Area Managers) by maximizing visibility to the right customer at the right time, also allowing Southern States to automatically send out targeted information – about the regulations, Southern States’ equipment, and the stage of compliance.
By performing these actions automatically, the CRM would essentially become a marketing tool. Information, entered back into the Southern States database, would allow tracking of the project in a specific utility and eventually identify the opportunities and utility contacts at an early stage, increasing the likelihood of a successful closure.
Since we had already helped Southern States choose and incorporate Salesforce.com CRM into their business process, it was easy for ALTAVI to create a campaign to suit Mr. Speas’ needs. ALTAVI Managing Partner, Steven Jameson, worked with marketing to determine the key market information, then helped build out a data repository that would ultimately be directed to salespeople.
