Weldspares OKI is one of the UK's leading independent wholesale suppliers of welding, personal protective equipment (PPE) and related industrial products. The company has one of the widest product ranges in the industry, with in excess of 13,000 stock lines, and sells to over 4,500 customers. Its annual turnover is £4.5 million.

"We operate in an exceptionally competitive environment where prices are continually declining," says Weldspares managing director, Mark Underwood. "We import a lot of products from low cost manufacturing countries and there has been significant price deflation on those. In addition there has been considerable consolidation within both the industry and the customer base."

In order to create a more focused sales strategy and help the sales team identify sales opportunities Weldspares invested in VECTA Sales Intelligence software. "A lot of our business comes from a small number of customers and there is a tendency to ignore the ones that are awkward to talk to," says Alan Underwood, IT & Marketing director at Weldspares. "With VECTA our sales executives actually have a reason for every call. They can say 'I want to talk about one particular product group and how we can save you some money'."

There are five people working in telesales at Weldspares and three sales representatives out on the road using VECTAPocket. "They have reacted very well to the software," says Alan. "VECTA is right every time: you have lost that business or it has switched from one customer to another. It's removed the gut feel and is giving us hard data on demand."

Weldspares has been using VECTA at management level to see where the company should be concentrating its time and effort. "We're using it to see where the business is going and to decide where our future is: which product groups are important to us, which ones we should cull off," explains Alan. "It identifies areas of growth as well as areas we don't want to be involved in: low margin areas, customers or product groups."

VECTA is helping the management at Weldspares to identify customers that actually cost the company money. "One of the hardest things to tell a salesman is that a customer isn't worth it," comments Alan, "but when you present him with a graph that shows you've made a net loss on the account and you've visited five times and you've sent ten catalogues, you can prove your point."

Another business benefit that Weldspares has identified since deploying VECTA is improved communications with its customers: "Using VECTA we can actually let customers know when they have lost business," says Alan. "Quite often they don't know that their customers have stopped buying something because many of them aren't as computerised as we are so for us to be able to tell them that they've lost business is a useful tool. They can go away and investigate why they've lost it and if they get it back we usually get it back too."

The results speak for themselves. Since using VECTA the sales executives at Weldspares are achieving more revenue. "When they perform their monthly reports it's clear that they are selling more and when we run a VECTA campaign it achieves the results that we set out for: we do increase sales to that group of customers or on the product line that we've targeted," says Mark. "As an example we ran a VECTA-based campaign on a particular product and doubled the sales of that product for the month. Thanks to VECTA there has been a significant up-turn in sales on that particular product line."

Alan concludes: "With VECTA we've seen as much as a 50 to 60% increase in sales of every product we targeted. The software has really helped to streamline our business and will play a vital role in the success and profitability of the business in the future."

"With VECTA we've seen as much as a 50 to 60% increase in sales of every product we targeted. The software has really helped to streamline our business and will play a vital role in the success and profitability of the business in the future."

Allan Underwood
Director
Weldspares OKI