Jack Pennington Ltd is an industrial distributor selling fixings, fasteners, tools and electrical accessories to mechanical and electrical contractors. The product line comprises 20,000 codes, over 12,000 of which are active within any given year. The company has in the region of 1,400 customers on its books, and an outbound sales team of five managing some 500 active accounts per month. Its annual turnover is £6 million.

As a single location company competing against multi-branched nationals, Jack Pennington faces stiff competition. "It's a very competitive market," says Simon Mettrick, operations director at Jack Pennington. "Although some customers are very loyal and put a lot of emphasis on the service element, when it comes to the big orders it always comes down to price."

Over the last three years this price pressure has driven margins down and Jack Pennington has found itself in the frustrating position of selling more products, to more customers for less profit. "We've actually reversed that recently but there's been a significant reduction in the prices of the products we sell," explains Mettrick. "For example the price of some fasteners has fallen by two thirds in the last five years."

For the past six months the sales team at Jack Pennington Ltd has been using VECTA sales intelligence software from Vecta Software Corporation Ltd, which the company has implemented on a three-year retail basis. VECTA is a suite of sales intelligence and performance management tools designed to analyse customers' buying patterns, helping companies to increase their share of customer spend, improve customer retention and link-sell more effectively.

The solution uses transactional data - factual data rather than subjective data - that comes from a company's back office system. It is information like: Did they buy? Didn't they buy? How much did they buy? Is spend going up or down? This enables sales professionals to create realistic, achievable sales objectives.

VECTA can also alert sales professionals when a customer stops buying certain lines. The ability to identify potential threats or problems with lost or drifting customers is extremely valuable especially when, like Jack Pennington, you have a catalogue of over 20,000 products.

"Vecta approached us with their VECTA solution and after having been shown what it can do we invested in five licences," explains Mettrick. "The system was up and running and everybody fully trained in a matter of weeks."

The sales representatives at Jack Pennington run VECTA on laptops and are sent weekly sales intelligence updates from the office. Two of them had never used a PC before. "They had a much steeper learning curve but are now using it as well as the others," reports Mettrick.

On a day-to-day basis the sales team uses VECTA to analyse the accounts of customers they are going to visit. The software allows them to generate comprehensive information on current buying activity, the turnover of the accounts and the products which are, or are not, being bought.

"We also run product focussed campaigns, which concentrate on specific ranges, and we pull out the relevant accounts in order to identify areas where they're missing out," explains Mettrick. "This enables the sales team to cross- and link-sell more effectively. As a company we take a very product driven approach."

VECTA has become an integral part of the sales process at Jack Pennington Ltd. "At our fortnightly sales meetings the first thing on the agenda now is VECTA," says Mettrick. "A lot of the key performance indicators are taken straight out of the software and as a company it enables us to easily monitor how each product range is performing."

Since implementing VECTA Jack Pennington Ltd has already started to generate extra revenue. "Over the last six months we have seen an improvement in sales much of which is attributable to VECTA," says Mettrick. "We know this because we ask our sales guys to give us specific examples of what they've used VECTA for and details of orders that they know have resulted from information generated by VECTA. We're confident in the return on investment and think that the software will have paid for itself within a year."

"Over the last six months we have seen an improvement in sales much of which is attributable to VECTA. We are confident in the return on investment and think that the software will have paid for itself within a year."

Simon Mettrick
Operations Director
Jack Pennington Ltd