Established in 1974, Allparts Automotive Ltd is one of the UK's leading professional distributors of automotive components providing a comprehensive range of OEM and own-brand products to all areas of the motor trade. The company is also a member of the UK Parts Alliance, an association of strong independent businesses, which each operate in defined areas of the UK. Allparts has a network of seven large-scale specialist distribution centres throughout the central south of England with aggressive plans to open further outlets during the next three years.

The UK's automotive aftermarket industry is worth in excess of £4 billion per annum* for the 24 million plus cars on Britain's roads, but the industry is highly competitive in terms of price and service as cars become more reliable and businesses compete to win and retain share of sales from a shrinking number of bodyshops.

In response to increasing competitive pressure on the business and to counter the general shrinkage within the market, Allparts invested in VECTA, the sales intelligence and performance management solution from Vecta Software Corporation Ltd.

"Our back-office system didn't give us the ability to monitor customers' buying patterns easily. There was concern that we were missing sales opportunities and not selling as effectively as we needed too," explains Allparts managing director Mark Darvill. "We decided to invest in a sales intelligence tool and after evaluating all the solutions on the market we opted for VECTA."

Allparts has now been using VECTA sales intelligence across its branch network for over a year. Within each distribution centre there is a telesales operation, and the company also has a field-based sales team. There is a central database that covers the whole business and satellite databases at every branch so there are subsets of data across the network that are updated on a daily basis from the central location.

"Everybody who needs to access customer data uses VECTA. In total we have 19 seats and the software is used actively every day," says Darvill. "It has become fundamental to the way we now run the business and has changed our sales culture completely from that of a reactive business to that of a proactive selling organisation."

VECTA delivers measurable business benefits in two key areas: instant visibility of sales and marketing opportunities and improved management control. The software enables Allparts to achieve an increased share of their customer spend and higher profitability per order. Intelligent agents within the software highlight opportunities to increase the value of a sale while sophisticated data analysis helps users to cross- and link-sell more effectively. The automotive aftermarket is a very high volume industry and there are a lot of returns either through purchases being incorrect or customers ordering several versions of the same part - often from different suppliers - and then picking the one they want and returning the others. One of the major problems for Allparts was not being able to quickly measure the impact of these returns on the business and VECTA has given them that capability. "We have set up specific reports to monitor returns," comments Darvill. "Thanks to VECTA every branch now knows exactly what it has sold and exactly what has been returned to the branch which makes it easy to keep track of stock."

Allparts has a very product focused approach to selling and runs frequent promotions. For instance it might run a promotion on brake fluid and use VECTA to identify the customers who have previously bought brake fluid but stopped buying it, customers who still buy it but could buy more and customers who have never bought it.

"The information we get out of VECTA empowers each branch to approach those customers with a situational fluency that demonstrates an in-depth knowledge of their current circumstances and future needs," says Darvill. "The success rates have been phenomenal. Promotions have been up to fives times more successful since we started using VECTA."

VECTA has enabled Allparts to target its campaigns much more effectively than it ever could before. "Using VECTA we're now able to take a product and easily identify where we can effectively sell more of it," concludes Darvill. "It's allowed us to become a much more proactive business and the net result is that we've been seeing record sales figures over the past few months."

Mark Darvill
Managing Director
Allparts