Case Study - A Signwriting Company story

Introducton

Early in 2007 a long standing Central Florida based Sign Writing company found itself in a difficult situation. Despite 26 years of service, and having grown to two high street branches and 15 employees it was facing a rapid decline.Operations, sales, stock, inventory, staffing and the client base had decayed rapidly following a change of ownership from its prime levels, and was now operating on a shoe-string income, with 2 management staff, one engineer, one laborer and an administrator who served numerous roles including design and front office work. It was forced to shut down one of its branch offices; despite it having been a regular fixture in the market for over a quarter of a century.This company was in a rather desperate situation. It even found itself many months behind on its payroll; staff was essentially working on a good-will basis and living in hope and trust that things would “pick up next week” and maybe they could get paid this time!

The remaining shop morale was in turmoil and the work that was available to the company was hounded by issues with suppliers and vendors of the stock, parts and equipment they needed to fulfill the limited orders on the books.Any half-respecting business analyst would have looked at this company and written it off.  Sell the remaining assets; a cherry-picker high lift and a truck, sell the printing equipment that had any residual value and move onto pastures anew.  The debt ledger was well in the red, the top line performance of the company was only 8% of the stated performance when the new management team took it on.

The management team spent almost 80% of their time at work pleading with vendors and suppliers; negotiating payment terms and begging for more time to make good on their debts.Central Florida CRM Solutions was asked to have a look at the company, its processes, and front and back office roles, and consider if the situation was simply a reflection of really poor management, bad luck, circumstances, or a situation that was recoverable.  The traditional role of the CRM Solutions team was to apply the philosophy of Customer Relationship Management; not to engage in the systemic repair of a dying company! This would be no small challenge to say the least; let alone considering the risk that the team wouldn’t be paid for their efforts!Despite many reasons for refusing this business opportunity, the CRM Solutions team took an engagement with the company, and set to work.

Review and Watching Phase

The first phase of the typical process is a detailed review of the day-to-day running of the business, and to watch, quietly, yet intently as the staff go about their daily business.  No criticisms, affirmations or suggestions are made at this stage. It is extremely important that detailed analysis be preceded by detailed review.  Staff very quickly warmed to the CRM Solutions Team, and quickly forgot that they were there.

Two or more days into the watching/analysis phase staff felt open enough to discuss their views, their issues, and, as is very typical, quickly voiced their concerns over inefficient processes, forgotten tasks, heaps of paperwork, and the fact that each and every day was a huge juggling act of managing planned commitments against external factors; like walk in public and retail enquiries, the phone ringing off the hook from creditors, rather than customers, the mess in the stock room, the lack of space, tools, equipment and suppliers/vendors that would see them get through another day.The CRM Solutions Team noted all key facets of the business processes.  Those that worked well, as well as those that lacked efficiency or effectiveness.

Interview and Analysis Phase

The CRM Solutions Team worked diligently, following up the watching phase with a detailed series of interviews with the company at all levels from the owner(s), to the key staff, and the administration team. The interview process didn’t stop there; it also included key prospective customers and repeat customers to the business that had remained loyal throughout.At first glance, a well orchestrated Customer Relationship Management solution couldn’t hope to address this companies issues, could it?  What caused a 26 year old established mainstream company to suddenly find itself in a very difficult position? 

The Findings of the Reviews

Systemic challenges riddled this company. The relatively new management team had limited or even no managerial experience, and were attempting to run the business remotely to make things even harder. Due to the lack of income being generated by the business itself they found themselves unable to make a permanent move to take on the task of running their business full time on premises.  Instead they did what they could to run the business remotely (time zones away; not miles away!); effectively leaving 2 key staff members and an administrator operating in a vacuum for weeks or even months at a time.Any escalations or requests for managerial support were met with delays in responses. A long distance telephone call was appropriate of course for dealing with issues, but not for watching over the state of business in real time, approving paperwork, signing orders and so on.The one remaining store location was in a high street location, meaning that often a full third of the employees were left dealing with low value walk in and speculative business. This they were attempting to do whilst in the middle of a more lucrative and more profitable piece of work in the back office which they had to abandon to deal with a front office enquiry.

The administrator had a dual role in graphics/design as well as handling the back office functions, book-keeping, receivables and debt-ledger.  Obviously, being multi-tasked there were many occasions when other functions had limited focus, and were even forgotten half-way through. The role was almost impossible. To use a business tag line the role was like “Fire-Fighting”; jumping from one burning issue to another. Never quite enough to put the fires out, but enough to keep from a wildfire breakout.The management team were convinced that the person who originally owned the company had gone with ‘all the customers’ and had re-established the old business again under a new name.  CRM Solutions challenged the management staff for proof of the customer base, and to see a single consolidate view of all of the customers over the last 26 years.  This was met with responses like “Well, we have most of the names in the billing system, well, okay, we have all those that we’ve sent out since January….the previous owner kept a paper ledger of customers and we haven’t been able to find it” to “well, the data is in those gray filing cabinets, but we’ve been too busy to go through it all”Front office tasks, like dealing with customer enquiries, were noted on the closest scrap of available paper, post-it notes or even the back of envelopes! Rough drawings and commitments made with customers were often lost, discarded, forgotten or simply over-written! 

The task of handing a front-office sale, for example, the ordering of a large ‘yard-sale’ sign was completed by ‘shouting’ at the other team members over the noise of tools, printers, phones ringing etc. The business was reliant on memory to meet its daily obligations. We saw many instances of frustrated customers phoning in saying “Hey, we expected delivery of our shop-signs this morning at 8am; where are you?” – to find the shop staff giggling embarrassedly at their error and doing a quick 20 minute rush job to complete what should have been done a week or two earlier!CRM Solutions also noted that no single member of the remaining company had responsibility for marketing, sales or business development.  “Sales was something that happened by itself. Marketing and Advertizing is really expensive. There’s enough repeat business from existing clients, so we don’t really have time to look for more customers”Processes were extremely inefficient. Some of the customers of this company were from local government or state entities. The company even boasted the chosen vendor relationship with several large housing and urban development companies that tendered for significant business opportunities; like placing the entry-ways and Signage to Home Owners or Deed Restricted communities.  These types of large and ‘efficiently run’ companies expect an audit trail from their suppliers! They expect quotes, in written format, that are detailed and accurate! They require professional drawings, site-surveys’ and often extensive management of appropriate permits for electrical as well as landscaping needs/installations. 

The CRM Solutions team saw limited evidence that any attempt was being made to co-ordinate the available customer needs, to document them, and to create written quotations.  We even saw instances of customers phoning in and saying “Well Billy [name changed to protect identities of persons concerned] told us we could have the sign for $250 and it would be ready for collection today” Of course, without any accountability, or audit trail no member of staff had any device or instrument to disprove the claim being made by the customer. The customer claims were flatly accepted. This naturally exposed the company to inherent financial risk because they had no way of auditing or proving their prior customer obligations or commitments.CRM Solutions also noted that the weekly tasks for the entire team were jotted down on a white dry-wipe board. Workflow dictated that the person who makes the sale was to put details of the expected delivery date and location on the whiteboard.  There was only enough space for the current week view, and any work for ‘next-week’ was noted on paper and left on the desk.  Each Monday morning the team would sort through the weeks ‘work-orders’ and note them on the board.  Of course the board was only semi-accurate until around mid morning on Wednesday!

To compound this most of the company’s work related to extensive field based installations that could take two days or more to complete. Especially those involving large sign-posts, shop-signs, advertizing hoardings or commercial installations. That often meant that 66% of the employees were out of the ‘shop’ in the field and isolated from what was happening back at the shop. This inefficiency led to many wasted hours each day on ‘expensive’ and ‘inefficient’ telephone calls to check in “What did you tell Mr. Jones about the color of the sign?” to phoning back to the office to check “is there enough pink-vinyl for the Smith job tomorrow?”  CRM Solutions also noted that no effort was made to include all the necessary costs of sales into the work-orders.  For example, a simple $5 dollar fee was added for delivery, even if the delivery needed 40 gallons of gas for the 7.5 ton truck! Or worse, an 8 miles per gallon truck was used to deliver a yard-sale sign measuring 2’ square over a 60 mile round-trip!  It would have been 900% more cost effective to use a motorcycle courier or even a taxi company to deliver the sign instead and freed the staff up for further revenue generating activities, rather than an hour of round trip driving!

The Recommendations

The CRM Solutions team created a detailed plan in the form of a roadmap to guide the business to a healthier position.

The recommendations concentrated on two facets of the business;

1.     Work-flow and Process plan

2.     Marketing and Sales plan

Work-Flow and Process plan

The Work-Flow and Process plan took the form of a detailed breakdown of the lifecycle of the customer engagement and to apply a logical, methodical and repeatable workflow to all day to day activities across the business. The heart of this work-flow management plan included the deployment of a leading standards based Customer Relationship Management system that would act as ‘heartbeat central’ for all business operations.  CRM Solutions recommended on this occasion a CRM Package that was web standards driven; providing the company with open access from any personal computer, even if remote from the business itself; for example at a customer or client site.This company needed a defined work-flow that guided the business through the sales and customer engagement lifecycle, whilst at the same time giving them a ‘dashboard’ view of all current commitments.

A key benefit of course would be the fact that all employees had access to the same information 24 hours a day times 7 days a week from any location. It would even allow employees to check on their tasks and activities for the day ahead, the week ahead, or even see easily what was coming up next month.

Marketing and Sales Plan

CRM Solutions provided a detailed analysis and set of recommendations for Marketing and Sales.  This wasn’t in the form of a simple recommendation to ‘advertize’ the business!  This business didn’t need advertizing; it needed to be able to ‘farm’ within the existing customer base, rather than ‘hunt’ for new business.  Approximately 65% of the companies regular business was repeat business from within the ‘installed base’ of clients. It required specific guidance on how to understand the existing client base, how to attribute value to the client base, and how to market ‘internally’ to the existing client base. 

Therefore the challenge was more of creating an ‘inside sales’ capability that empowered every employee in the business the capability to sell. Of course the employees would have little recognition of the prowess of their own sales capability but by providing them the right tools, at the right time and in the right context every employee in the company became effectively a salesperson!Again, the same CRM package offered all the necessary work-flow and tools for Marketing and Sales. A single package for customer administration, management of tasks, work-flow, quotes and orders, and in the same package the ability to monitor and track leads, opportunities, clients, accounts, vendors and suppliers without bias.A further recommendation was an improvement in the companies web capabilities.

Their current website was basically a “scanned image” of their yellow page advertisement. It exposed the very basics of the company, and had little market impact.  Not only did it have no relevant content for search engines but it was impossible for the company to derive ‘business intelligence’ from their website.  CRM Solutions made recommendations to change the nature of the website from a static page or two, to a dynamic Content Management System that allowed all relevant employees and management the capacity to easily add new pages and content, whilst at the same time giving them a live view into the behavior of the clients on their website. We also encouraged and recommended the use of live web monitoring software that would allow web users the opportunity to chat in real-time with the company if they had a question or query whilst browsing.

No costly recommendations were made for advertizing or procurement of expensive marketing lists. This company simply needed a mechanism to capture their daily activities, and by doing so it would rapidly create the marketing lists necessary for ongoing market “farming”.  Companies that are much less established have to assume a market attack plan around “Marketing Hunting”.  In this case it was simple.  Understand who your customers are, their buying interests, and build a business intelligence capability around it.  In regular cycles it would be possible to mine the data and target product at the ‘installed’ base without a single dime being spent on external market data.

Methodology

CRM Solutions agreed a roadmap, concentrating first on Customer Relationship Management, then as a second phase the updating of the public website and associated infrastructure.The client chose to use a hosted CRM solution as they had no information technology capabilities in house.

The skills available were limited to basic computer use of standard ‘office’ type packages, email, word-processing. Only one specialist package was used for ‘accounting’ and that would remain.  In the hosted CRM solution context the CRM Solutions team assumed full responsibility for the deployment of the CRM solution in its own hosting center, making it available to employees over a standard internet connection.  No specific client software was required, as all access to and from the system would be done over standard web browsers like Internet Explorer or Safari etcIt was decided that a slow and steady approach be taken to CRM deployment, concentrating first on collecting all current business obligations and activities, and worrying about ‘historical’ data injection at some point downstream.The CRM Solutions team spent 3 or 4 days on site with all employees and management and conducted one on one training and familiarization to key CRM contexts and the software package with each of employees as the interface presented itself to their daily activities. It also took an opportunity to use a weekend for detailed ‘classroom’ training with all employees so that the system was ready for ‘go-live’ the following Monday.

Customer Relationship Management is often confused with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. In some ways they are similar. CRM however concentrates on the customer engagement model, where ERP concentrates on the business engagement model; based on looking at inventory, stock, facilities, resources etc. ERP is much more at home in the confines of manufacturing companies. For companies involved in ‘professional services’ or the direct engagement with the consumer in a direct sales activities a CRM system is a better fit.  Therefore the CRM Solutions team recommended CRM as opposed to an ERP solution.Customer Relationship Management is as much about philosophy and process as it is actually about the underlying software model! 

Clients are free to chose which elements of the CRM solution are deployed or ‘activated’ first.  The most traditional approach and the one which provides the most significant early impact is the tracking of Sales and Opportunities.On this occasion all agreed the Sales Management was the key to short term success, so the deployment concentrated on the following day one modules;

• Leads
  Information on customers being engaged for the first time
• Potentials
  Activities related to Leads who have matured into potential Clients
• Contacts
  Information related to individual people, be they Clients, Suppliers, Competitors, Vendors, Partners etc
• Accounts
  Information that groups individuals by the accounts that they are related to. For example, a Vendor is an account, the individuals that you deal with at the Account are Contacts
• Quotes
  A module for assigning, recording, documenting and storing all quotations related not only to individual contacts but also to groups of contacts in the form of Accounts
• Sales Orders
  A module for tracking physical orders, expected orders and managing the sales pipeline by opportunity stage
• Calendar
  A shared group work calendar that combined the individual activities of each employee against a master shared group calendar for the company

Solution Architecture

A simple architecture provided ease of use and management. The company already had several Personal Computers, as these were readily available both in the front-office (the shop front) and in the back-office (the workshop). All employees had Personal Computers at home and one or two had smart-mobile phones with internet access.  Therefore the architecture simply required the installation of a small and very cost effective local network at the shop that would allow all PC’s to share a common internet connection. 

From this single internet shared connection all PC’s had 24x7 access to the world wide web; in other words, all PC’s could see and access the hosted CRM solution.  To ease deployment the CRM Solutions team assumed responsibility and management of the companies web domain registration and hosted not only the CRM Solution itself, but all the web services and email services on the single domain.This allowed for seamless and open access to email, productivity, web and CRM from any internet connected device by simply opening a browser and pointing the address at;

• Webmail – instant access to company email system from any web browser
• WWW – instant access to company web pages and content
• Mail – standard email client access for Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird clients to email folders
• CRM – web based access to the CRM system from all PC’s, both in the office and remotely

Workflow improvement and recommendations

A very basic workflow methodology was employed in the initial stages of the Customer Relationship Management system deployment. It was agreed to start with the tracking and management of leads and to use basic lead management as the catalyst for expansion into subsequent activities, like promotion of leads to opportunities, and from there to contacts and accounts. 

By starting ‘small’ the impact on the daily routine was minimized but it would afford the most significant early impact for the improvement of performance across the company.

An example daily workflow and its impact

At 9am a potential customer enters the shop. An employee who was busy making a sign for an existing work-order deals with the potential client enquiry.  The client asked for details of how much it would cost to create a new set of panel and door lettering for his truck.  The employee discussed the needs traditionally with the client, but this time, used the CRM solution to capture the clients information.  By using the CRM solution to capture this client information in the form of a ‘lead’ entry the employee was naturally guided into asking all of the right questions, like contact details, address, and details of the nature of the enquiry. 

This was simply recorded in the system, with a description like “The client advised that the graphics design and manufacture would cost $150 dollars, and installation was an extra $40 dollars” The employee also noted the nature of the request, approximate dimensions etc in the lead description.The client left the shop, happy that they had some high level information to continue their investigations to source a potential supplier. 

The employee let the potential customer know that the details were recorded, and if they came back to follow up on their request they simply had to provide their name, and any employee could assist them further.Naturally, the stored lead information was immediately available for all the employees on all of their systems, so no new deliberate conversation was required about the nature of the enquiry.  Actually, the standing joke became “Don’t ask me, it’s in the CRM system!

”Three days later the same client phoned the shop via their published 1-800 number. The employee answering the phone was told by the customer that they had been in the shop a few days earlier, but couldn’t remember the name of the employee that they spoke to.  A very simple question and answer session with the potential customer was all that was needed to find the appropriate record! The employee only had to know part of the name, the telephone number, the address, the date of enquiry, or any specifics on the nature of the original enquiry to quickly find the record.

Immediately a very professional demeanor empowered the employee’s. The employee was able to say “Okay, I have it here.  You spoke to Billy, and we have your original request details”

Suddenly this company was beginning to behave like an established incumbent large player! The customer was relieved too that he didn’t have to go through the whole explanation again, and could simply say “Great, I’d like to go ahead and order the sign for my truck, can I pop in tomorrow and work with you to design it?”

Again, the CRM system offers all functions from promoting the ‘lead’ into an opportunity, and to act as a repository for the associated documentation, drawings, and naturally good for the company itself, surety on the originally documented price and what was included in the price quoted and what wasn’t!  The employee handling this new dialogue was able to quickly identify the record, and change the status of the lead to an opportunity.

The system even emailed the original employee, Billy, letting him know that the lead had returned and would be looking to design the sign!  No additional detailed conversations or clarifications required.

The next morning, the client returned, and at the front-desk, Billy was able to quickly retrieve the appropriate record, quickly review the notes and attachments made by his colleagues and get straight to work with the customer on designing the signage. On completion of the drawing, Billy undertook to pass the details to the design team who would create the electronic master and email a picture of it to the client that evening for revue and comments.  Billy set a task (to-do item) for the administrator to take the drawn concept and turn it into a master template on the design system. 

The administrator received an email with the work order, and was able to quickly attach the completed drawing and have it emailed to the customer for comment.  Naturally, the email was delivered through the CRM system, so the email itself and the attachment was added to the opportunity and was instantly accessible by all of the staff.

A week went by before the client returned, saying “Sorry, I was really busy and had to travel out of town. The drawing is perfect.  Can I go ahead and order it? When can I have it installed?” 

Billy was now able to close the sale, promote from opportunity to sales stage of ‘quoted’ and ‘ordered’ and put the planned installation date in the calendar system.

Now, this is just one simple work-flow follow through for a single customer instance.  The company may have had 12 to 20 of these types of enquiries during the week.  Some of them very potentially lucrative, like a big sign for a new housing development worth many thousands of dollars, and several small ones like this truck sign that may be worth a couple of hundred dollars. 

They key building facet was the ‘dashboard’ view now afforded to all employees. All staff, including the management team had instant access to their actual sales pipeline, from leads to opportunities and then to actual sales by sales stage.  This live dashboard view also assisted the entire team in better prioritizing their work, electing to ensure the high value high stakes business was first priority, and subsequent smaller, but often as time consuming small client opportunities were dealt with on the appropriate priority scale.

The Next Phases

Over the first couple of months, the company amassed a very accurate and detailed record of all their sales operations activities. They had a couple of hundred leads in the system that were ‘stalled’ or had potentially gone cold. 

They created a campaign on their CRM system that sent a polite reminder to all leads that had provided email addresses thanking them for their interest some time ago, and to not hesitate to follow up if they still needed some product or assistance.  The leads that were only available by phone were added to a follow up campaign that would see the staff phoning the potential clients to follow up.

The website was updated, and the additional of the Content Management System allowed the staff themselves to easily publish details of new products and services. They even began uploading before and after pictures of shop-fronts and signs that were deployed during the month; a developing and building picture gallery.

The world wide web is driven by search-engines; which only perform well if the textual content of websites is regarded as ‘relevant’ to the public search enquiries they conduct.  The more the web site was updated with content, the more relevant the search-engines placed the company in the order of results.  Therefore the web based client activity increased markedly.

After about 3 months of operation, if there was ever a quite period in the day, say at lunchtime, or even occasionally in the evenings, the staff and management would spend time entering old customer records into the system.  This ‘back-haul’ was now regarded as being critical to the ongoing success of the company. 

Why? See the results section next!

The Results

• The company’s sales performance improved by 60% in the first month
• The company’s output in product lead to close time reduced by a record percentage. They were doing almost twice as much work in the same time periods
• The first follow up campaign with cold leads collected generated an 8% uptake – adding 30 or more customers to the company that may not have closed without follow up
• Telephone based follow ups within 14 days of the original enquiry went up from zero before the CRM Solution to over 18% uptake. That’s almost 1 new customer in every 5 that they would traditionally have lost
• Within 3 months, the website went from a hit or two a day, to over 50 to 60 search hits per week. The company agreed to add web campaigns to their CRM templates to get a better handle on leads generated by their website and ensure they were followed up the same way that email, walk-ins and telephone enquiries were handled
• Within 6 months, the company had improved to a point that the management team were able to finally consider making the final move and take on the company locally. The recurring monthly incomes were now in the black
• Within 6 months all employees were getting their regular pay-checks!
• Within 9 months all employees had also been paid the backlog in missing pay checks!
• Within 9 months the company had rethought the requirement to have a $20,000 per annum yellow-pages advertisement. Their website was far more valuable. They opted to go for a less costly yellow pages ad and instead focused their spending on improving the web site even further. The yellow pages acted as a catalyst for referrals to their 1-800 numbers of course, but a simple publication of the web address in the yellow pages ad increased traffic to the website by factors of 10!
• Within a year the company had paid its creditors, and had re-opened previously closed supply-chains for parts, materials, print supplies and their ledgers were now operating in the black
• Within a year the company decided to branch into new business opportunities; like replacing lighting units on high-rise buildings; a spin-off of their licenses and capabilities for sign-writing that saw them enter a new market where there was previously only one competitor available!
• Within the year the company extended its CRM into a customer portal; allowing their clients to report problems or repairs needed to their signs. From simple things like ‘blown bulbs’ to refurbishment, remaking, resizing or simple replacement. The addition of the Customer Care and Customer Support portal also opened up a whole new line of recurring business for the company that had traditionally sold ‘as is’ and trusted that clients would approach them for replacements. By proactively engaging their clients into an ongoing support and maintenance relationship they were able to increase recurring revenue from zero dollars per annum (measurable) to over 20% recurring revenue’s for support contracts

Summary, and overall assessment

A CRM Solution alone was not the medicine needed.

The solution for this company was the CRM Solution in conjunction with business analysis, workflow analysis and training.

The impact of even slight improvements in day to day activities had a profound impact on employee morale. Their attitude to each day changed, and they actually learned to thrive around their new tools. All employees at all levels felt empowered by the information at their fingertips.

CRM Solutions were proven to be a reliable and cost-effective platform that did not require an investment in tens of thousands of dollars of bespoke and vertically sensitive proprietary software. A combination of flexibility, adoption of open-standards and web based technology offered incredible returns on investment.

It was also proven that basic adoption of Customer Relationship Management offered incredibly powerful ‘farming’ capabilities within the client base.  Overall the number of client based recommendations to their friends and families increased as the overall positive performance and experience with the company was shared.

In yesterdays world commercial entities would only need to engage in 2 to 3 dialogues with a prospective customer before closing a sale. In todays world that number is between 10 and 20 dialogues; often across different channels, like the telephone, web, and email or in person.  The only way that companies can embrace the changing expectations of the consumer is by aligning their processes to record, trace, track and follow-up on the very quickly changing way customers expect to be handled. 

Consumers often make their purchase decision by trawling the web for options before even speaking to a company, and then speak to them and engage with them in order to qualify, or disqualify their previous buying assumption.  It is critical that today’s business be able to monitor these cross channel communications with their consumers, to provide a single, top-down and business relevant view.  The consumer sees their suppliers as a single entity, and expect to be remembered. 

They expect all facets of the company they are dealing with to know what they want, what they need, and especially expect the companies to have a solid grasp of their history and previous engagements.  Customer loyalty is a two way street.  If a company fails to meet the expectations and needs of their customers then the loyalty will not be repaid.