Epoxy Floors Texas, the highest rated epoxy coating installer in Texas, provides epoxy floor coatings to garages, warehouses, and other areas where durable flooring is important.
Epoxy Floors Texas' Difficulty With Handling Numerous Customer Inquiries
Since growing out of their home base in Houston, Texas to service other major metro areas in the state, they’ve experienced several growing pains that have reduced potential revenue.
For example, on some days, sales personnel are needed out in the field to help with projects, often in areas with poor cell phone coverage. This meant that prospective customers often weren’t able to reach them, and as a result, the company would lose business. So Epoxy Floors Texas tried to combat this problem by contracting a phone answering service to make sure no call went unanswered.
However, as demand for their services grew, they began to open new avenues of communication for current and prospective customers, such as their website. Customers would reach out via a contact form, or directly to the company through email. And given the fact that prospects shop around for the best provider, it was crucial that they received a prompt and quality response.
But the sheer volume of customer inquiries turned out to be a major challenge. With prospects reaching out through a multitude of different channels with little predefined organization, the sales reps struggled to keep up.
Reps had no consistent way to learn enough about every prospect’s needs quick enough. And when they did, they couldn't tell if someone else had already gotten back to them, leading to some customers receiving multiple call backs while others would never hear back from the company at all...
This was a challenge Colladeo was ready to meet.
Our Robust Sales System Solution That Saved Hundreds of Lost Leads
“What's the price of doing nothing?”
At Colladeo, that's something we like to ask our customers at the very beginning of every new relationship. It helps hone in focus on problem areas that have the biggest overall impact on a company’s ROI.
A problem can be perceived as very real, and yet have negligible financial impact. While other problems may be completely overlooked, while having a major financial impact.
In Epoxy Floors Texas' case, we learned very early on that the client was losing out on a sizable portion of their incoming leads. It was obvious that the price of doing nothing in terms of customer service and sales systems was far greater than an opportunity lost.
Plus, the client's reputation was also at stake. Customers tend to get upset when their inquiries go unanswered. And many won’t hesitate to tell their friends and complain online... not good!
Our method is based on having a solid business case for the client's success. We obsess over two areas of concern:
- Creating a solution itself that will fulfill the business case
- Ensuring this solution’s adoption by the client's employees
You may know that some sales reps can be very opinionated about how they do business. They know what works for them. So it was crucial that we provided them a system that would dramatically improve their day-to-day lives. That way, there’d be minimal resistance to change, and no question about the helpfulness of the solution.
We could not just promise results with a new system. We had to overdeliver so much that sales reps couldn’t believe they ever sold without it.
With that in mind, we did an extensive study of how the sales reps spent their working hours, how they moved around, how much time they spent on the phone versus in the field, and so on. We put together several prototypes and tested them. And when we had the requisite confidence that we were going in the right direction, we started developing.
The result of our development was a magical solution that provided a slick sales dashboard at the front end. But the real magic happened at the back end, where we integrated customer inquiries coming in via phone, email, and web – all in one place.
No matter how a lead came in, it had to be tested against duplicates, pass spam filters, and become geographically organized. For example, an inquiry for an epoxy coating job in Dallas would appear to the sales reps in Dallas’ exact location, not in Houston. (Previously, reps had no way of immediately knowing unless explicitly told by prospects).
Equally important was to track ongoing communication with prospective customers. Once a sales rep contacted a customer, this information would appear on the dashboard, so other reps knew to pursue other leads that had not already been contacted.
The dashboard provided visibility into the sales funnel's performance as well, so that management are able to gain insights into areas that need more focus to further improve their close rate.
Even though there are multiple sales automation tools on the market, nothing quite fit Epoxy Floors Texas' needs. And they are extremely happy that they chose a custom solution. By going custom, they protected themselves against being too dependent on someone else’s product roadmap and pricing strategy from shrink-wrapped software vendors who like to raise their prices over time.
Once built, the custom solution has only marginal operational costs and provides reliable service year-round.
Epoxy Floors Texas' Stunning Results
Without our custom built solution, Epoxy Floors Texas experienced a 30% increase in closed sales in the first year of operation alone. Not to mention that the dividends from business process automations like this tend to compound over time!
It's been over 5 years since the system has been in operation, and besides undergoing occasional maintenance and feature updates, it has run with rock-solid precision. No re-writes, no migration to a completely new solution.
And while software systems do eventually get replaced, we at Colladeo like to build them in such a fashion that they endure many years of use with grace.