Like all businesses today, companies in the manufacturing landscape are under increasing pressure to deliver personalised, relevant, and efficient experiences to customers, wherever they are. To achieve this, the most competitive companies are leveraging a wide range of CX technology solutions.
From Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) innovations to workforce management and service desk tools, there is no shortage of CX solutions for manufacturing companies to leverage today. Evans Manufacturing, a company founded in 1994 to create personalized products for brand promotion, turned to Freshworks and the Freshsales landscape to enhance its CX initiatives.
When the Evans Manufacturing brand realised it needed a scalable, convenient, and easy-to-use CRM solution to delight its customers, the Freshworks ecosystem seemed like the best possible choice. Let’s look at the work Freshworks and Evans Manufacturing did together.
Addressing Common CX Problems with Freshworks
For years before adopting Freshworks technology, Evans Manufacturing was seeing increasing evidence it needed to invest more time and effort into relationship-based selling. To do this, the company needed more than just a Customer Relationship Management tool – they needed a solution capable of empowering their salesforce and providing valuable insights.
The company had a specific view of the kind of CRM they were looking for. According to Greg Armstrong, they needed technology to support their complex workflows. Each rep in the team had dozens (even hundreds) of clients to work with, and they all needed access to the right data.
In the past, the company had relied on manual Excel spreadsheets for capturing and managing information, which led to a range of common challenges, including:
- Fragmented data spread across multiple apps
- No single view of the customer, which meant reduced options for personalisation
- Impersonal customer engagement with no opportunity to segment clients
- Fewer opportunities for proactive selling and seeking out new opportunities
To make matters worse, the company’s team had minimal experience using CRM solutions, which meant it was essential for Evans to find a software option that was easy to use.
Choosing the Right CRM Solution
While Evans had evaluated potential CRM solutions in the past, they hadn’t been able to meet all the company’s unique requirements. What really made Freshworks stand out from the pack, according to the Director of Infrastructure and Applications at Evans Manufacturing, was the simplicity.
Even with little to no experience using a CRM, implementation of Freshsales (the sales technology in the Freshworks ecosystem) only took three weeks. According to Armstrong, the ease of use was incredible. Employees were given the first few months to simply get used to the system, but there were very few growing pains to worry about.
Aside from crucial simplicity, Freshworks and Freshsales also offered Evans a convenient environment for centralizing all of the customer data available to the team. This allowed for better organization of critical information, which could be made accessible to every team member. At the same time, it streamlined activities like researching and quoting, allowing the teams to avoid the stress of switching between multiple apps.
Evans users had a clear distributor-client hierarchy in an easy-to-use environment that actually met well with the company’s budget.
How Freshsales Delivered Incredible Results
With Freshsales, the sales activity within Evans Manufacturing increased by an incredible 225% between the end of January 2020 and the end of August the same year. The revenue also increased by 9% compared to the year before, with revenue increasing by 23% a month later.
Even when the pandemic hit the market in 2020, Evans manufacturing was able to adapt quickly and in a very short time, retaining clients and securing new potential leads. Evans Manufacturing was also able to build prospect engagement activities with Freshsales, extracting end-user data to help them pivot and adapt according to the situation in question.
Freshsales has offered the full Evans team a convenient solution for managing customer relationships, and the mobile app has ensured team members can stay connected on the move too. Sales reps even felt more engaged by their work experience, as they started to notice the benefits of collecting information when engaging with distributors.
According to Armstrong, Freshsales provides a simple environment where the team can better support clients throughout the selling process.
Transforming the Sales Cycle with Freshsales
Before Evans was able to centralize the customer hierarchy with Freshsales, the sales team was dependent on distributors opening a tender for their clients. However, things transformed when reps could extract personalized information from the data gathered. By having all the required information needed for a distributor’s clients, the company has become more proactive about coming up with new sample product ideas to suit client requirements.
The Freshsales solution even helps the company to keep track of crucial metrics, essential to developing a deeper understanding of the target audience. Freshsales allowed team members to track click-through-rates for email campaigns, plan automated strategies for connecting with customers, and segment their list more effectively, for personalised interactions.
The segmented email list also meant that the company could create more relevant sales and marketing pitches for their clients, improving their chances of getting positive results in terms of click-through rates and conversions. Now, Evans Manufacturing can provide a highly customised and unique solution for each of their customers, and the more data they collect, the better the overall marketing and sales experience becomes.
Looking Ahead
With access to more distributor and customer information at hand, Evans Manufacturing has had a better opportunity to target the correct industries, tailor their messaging strategies, and create products for specific businesses. The company is even investing in proactive forms of service.
Moving forward, Evans plans on continuing to leverage the Freshworks and Freshsales ecosystem to improve engagement with their audience, and drive better brand loyalty.
