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WYKO is the largest supplier of industrial maintenance and power
transmission related products and services to the UK market, with
160 branches, 35 repair centres and an annual turnover of more than
£250 million.
Data Overload
WYKO differentiates itself from other companies in the market in
that it supplies both new products and a wide range of repair and
maintenance services. The product range includes its own, SRB bearings
and Fenner brand equipment, alongside a vast number of OEM and replacement
items (over 1 million items in stock), all designed to help manufacturing
companies to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
Always looking to improve customer service and response, WYKO realised
that they were pro-active in terms of maintenance services, but
not in terms of sales transactions, which tended to be more reactive
and demand driven. The major challenge faced by WYKO's sales team
was how to change this, bearing in mind the sheer volume of product
lines and the massive amount of customer transactional data across
the company's huge product portfolio.
WYKO management knew that when dealing with this number of components,
divided across 33 main product lines, customers would almost certainly
be interested in other related products during a sales transaction
- if a customer is buying an electric motor for example, they ought
to consider a drive to improve its efficiency, the forms needed
to claim back energy savings under the government ECA scheme, a
specialist bolt kit because it will be used in an environment with
higher than normal vibration etc. Unfortunately, even the most experienced
sales staff might not remember all these related items, likewise,
how are they to know if a customer they are about to call has stopped
buying?
The answer is to ensure that the sales team receive accurate, relevant
and timely information about their customers' buying patterns. In
order to achieve this goal, WYKO has implemented VECTA Sales Intelligence
software, which it has now rolled out across its entire sales operation.
The Solution
VECTA Sales Intelligence provides sales staff and managers with
a comprehensive view of all customer and sales activities. The software
monitors and analyses buying patterns, identifying cross-and link-sell
opportunities. This provides customers with a more personalised
and value-add service and WYKO with additional revenue. In the industrial
sector within which WYKO operates, customer drift is running at
over 20% and at a strategic level, WYKO is using VECTA to reduce
the incidence of customer drift in sales. By highlighting such trends
and opportunities, VECTA enables sales professionals, who are on
the road or on the telephone, to better prepare for calls and turn
reactive sales into proactive selling.
Prior to implementing VECTA, WYKO would generate sales reports
from its accounting systems but in order to build a reasonable picture
of customers' sales transactions, the data would take weeks to generate.
Once completed, they would be difficult to distribute, ultimately
going unused because the sales teams found them unwieldy, too detailed,
too long and paper based. As a result sales representatives often
lost out on opportunities because they were 'buried' in information
that was often out-of-date.
"Our sales reports were tied to the stock system and were printed
retrospectively," said Ali Stronach, Area Sales Director. "We knew
that sales opportunities were being lost because with extended product
ranges, the emphasis tended to come from sales engineers' relationships
and general knowledge of the customer. It was difficult for them
to go through the data and systematically ask the right kind of
sales questions across entire ranges and almost impossible to quickly
highlight client needs or pain points and therefore open up new
opportunities."
In contrast to traditional CRM systems, VECTA draws on data existing
within the accounting or ERP applications to quickly analyse and
summarise customers' buying patterns and behaviour. In addition,
it doesn't require the level of investment, both in terms of time
and money, as that of traditional 'Business Intelligence' (BI) solutions,
as VECTA delivers actionable sales intelligence, out-of-the-box.
There is no need to build the data warehouses and dashboards using
toolkits thatBI solutions provide, and unlike CRM, salespeople don't
have to laboriously enter data before they get useful information
back, so end user adoption is guaranteed."
"The deployment of VECTA was completed in two months with no difficulties,"
said Brian O'Leary, IT Director at WYKO. "This level of compatibility
and smooth installation has set the benchmark for future IT implementations
within the company."
Customer Alerts
VECTA proactively supplies alerts when there is a particular change
in a customer's buying habits and identifies the hidden sales opportunities.
All this information is delivered simply and dynamically, creating
clear opportunities for sales personnel within the existing customer
base and preventing customers slipping through the net, as is easily
done in such a large sales organisation.
"Our main objective with regards to individual sales people was to provide
our sales force with instant access to critical information, wherever
they are physically located. To achieve this we have issued each
sales person with a PDA on which the 'Pocket' version of VECTA allows
real-time sales information to be accessed and analysed within seconds.
Using this information, each salesperson can form SMART objectives
and ask meaningful questions relating to our customers' business."
"Just two days after installing VECTA, we set up an alert targeting accounts
where we were losing business," explains Stronach. "As a result,
one of our sales representatives discovered one of his customers
had stopped buying product from WYKO. After a quick call, the issue
the customer had was resolved and the business won back. Now the
customer feels cared for and we have a real sales success."
Affecting Change
In addition to the effect on local level operations, WYKO has also noticed
a less tangible, but no less powerful effect on the sales team's
customer approach. Using VECTA, sales personnel can pick up on client
problems, sometimes before the client, by showing them an overview
of their buying transactions. The result is an improvement in the
'value-added' relationship between WYKO and its customer, a principle
that is promoted strongly throughout the WYKO organisation.
"VECTA is enabling our sales team to truly understand customer buying patterns
and maximise our service offering to the customer, based-on analysis
of hard facts, not just intuition or gut-feel. Sales engineers have
told me they didn't realise how much they rely on VECTA - it has
already become an essential part of their working life."
Furthermore, the resulting change in culture among the sales force is having
a knock-on effect for the management team at WYKO.
"Since implementing VECTA there has certainly been an improvement
in the transparency of sales data, and targets are being met more
easily, something the management team appreciates," explains Bill
Wilson. "It has also brought the management team closer to the sales
team in a sense, making it easier for management to recognise potential
problems and set realistic objectives."
Ali Stronach
Area Sales Director
WYKO
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