How PrairieCoast Equipment Uses Visual Sales Pipeline to Achieve Sales Targets

Dealer: PrairieCoast Equipment
Locations: 10 Stores in British Columbia & Alberta, Canada
User: Jason Nichol, Interior Sales Manager

The Original Situation

When Jason Nichol arrived at PrairieCoast Equipment, the dealership needed a solution to consolidate its sales pipeline. It tracked sales through two independent systems, neither of which included customer relations management (CRM) capability. Sales reps kept all their customer notes in personal records that existed in notebooks, phone-based notes or just in their own heads.

“Working with a system like John Deere’s JDQuote2 was great compared to working in the systems other ag manufacturers’ dealers have to work with,” says Nichol. “But, I didn’t know if the quote was provided to the customer, or if the rep had just generated a quote for reference. And there was no flow to let me know what stage the quote was at.”

Furthermore, the fast-paced, multi-tasking environment of the sales department led to inefficiencies that slowed the sales process and caused customer communication to suffer. When PrairieCoast decided to invest in a CRM, Anvil App Works stood out because of its Salesforce backbone, its dynamic Visual Sales Pipeline and its responsiveness in addressing the dealership’s needs.

Pain Points That Led PrairieCoast to Anvil

The situation at PrairieCoast made managing the dealership’s sales pipeline difficult for Nichol. With as many as 9 sales people to manage, he spent large portions of each day bouncing back and forth between systems and working the phones, trying to stay on top of quotes his reps had generated and where each stood as it moved through the pipeline.

Nichol described the dealership’s pain points as follows.

Sales reps were largely left to their own devices for managing their work. This led to:

• Important customer information and deal detail isolated in notebooks or memory.
• Loss of customer history when reps left or retired.
• Reps tended to cut corners on record-keeping, resulting in lost details and poor communication.
• Reliance on reps’ memory to report sales status.
• Reps were often too busy to do the work needed to manage their own pipeline.

Managers spent too much valuable time and effort trying to visualize the sales pipeline. This led to:

• Multiple systems and isolated detail, which forced managers into investigating deals rather than supporting reps.
• Effort required to assemble a rep’s pipeline limited a manager’s attention to a superficial level.
• Wondering why a quote was created or whether the rep had provided it to a customer.
• Extremely limited access to rep notes, so managers could not see why a deal might have stalled or troubleshoot the problem.

Inexact measures of volumes and progress made reporting to general management difficult. This led to:

• Lack of confidence in monthly numbers and forecasting.
• Difficulty handling sales of ordered equipment that had not been delivered by manufacturer.
• Inability to efficiently manage new machinery orders based on advance sales, resulting in slower re-orders and lost revenue potential.

The Visual Sales Pipeline Solution

The sales pipeline lies at the core of any dealership’s operations. The fact that dealers like PrairieCoast continually expend so much effort on piecing together comprehensive pipeline snapshots only proves that point.

“Every day, I was going to each one of the sales reps’ quotes,” says Nichol, “seeing how many quotes they generated that day, trying to follow up on quotes from previous weeks to see if purchase orders were generated from them, and trying to tally up a total amount to provide upper management a forecast of where we might close this month or quarter.”

At best, after all that effort, Nichol explained he could only create a static snapshot of the sales pipeline that often became outdated in a few hours’ time — requiring the whole process to start over again.

“I am very thankful Anvil brought this board to us. It’s the best I’ve ever had to work with,” he reports. “It gives a manager a lot of information that he doesn’t have to go asking for or searching for, and I don’t have to pepper my sales team with a lot of questions.”

Benefits for the Sales Manager

Sitting atop the Salesforce CRM, Anvil harvests all the data provided by JDQuote2, as well as the customer profile and notes made by sales reps, to provide an up-to-the-minute representation of a dealership’s sales pipeline. Nichol particularly appreciates how it allows him to filter for a location, region, or single rep with only a couple of clicks, so he can quickly assess specific pieces of the pipeline.

Digitizing and centralizing all that information has transformed Nichol’s job. “All of the time I used to spend researching and chasing answers to questions is now spent supporting my sales team and working toward closing deals,” he says. “A lot of times, I can just send a quick note or text to help keep a deal moving along.”

“Anvil has been a lot easier to view,” according to Nichol. “It is more visual and more uniform.” Anvil lays all of PrairieCoast’s deals out in an array, sorting them into columns according to the dealership’s own sales-process staging. Visual, color-based cues indicate the state of each deal, while progress bars depict the deal’s lifespan. Together, they give reps and managers, alike, instantly recognizable feedback on each deal’s health.

“Once we set up a deal in JDQuote2, it automatically drops into the ‘New’ column on the board,” says Nichol. “And then, once the quote’s been presented to, reviewed with or emailed to the customer, our sales team simply drags it into the ‘Negotiation’ column. That lets us know that the customer now has the detail. At any stage, I can review that deal and see what needs to happen. Because our main goal is to get that quote into the ‘Sold’ column, right?”

PraireCoast elected to also create columns in its pipeline for ‘Trade Evaluation’, ‘Sold on Order’ and ‘Invoiced’. These columns offer more detailed insight into deals in the pipeline as well as providing segmented column totals that indicate current sales volume and revenue potential in each stage.

Benefits for the Sales Rep

According to Nichol, making any business solution work starts with the team members — and that goes double for technology. “It’s only producing what you’re asking it to do and how you’re managing it,” he says. And helping team members to see how participating benefits them, personally, is crucial.

“If you make it easy for people they will do it,” he claims.

“We started out just having the guys use the game plan,” says Nichol. “And then we moved into the visual pipeline, where they could spend 5 minutes at the beginning and end of each day to plan follow-through. Instead of jumping around through three screens to get one result, Anvil has simplified that process by putting all the things we were looking to do in one place,” he explains.

“When doing performance reviews with employees, the majority of the weaknesses I see stem from time management and keeping up with the pace,” he says. “While working closely with one employee, I found when he turned the page in his notes, that was it. He just kept turning forward, never back. Think about all the opportunities he was missing.”

Anvil digitized that employee’s notebook and transformed his performance, according to Nichol. “It’s definitely allowed him to see what is there in front of him — and what he had been missing,” he says. “It took him from an average performer to well above average in his overall results. His communication has improved, as well as his stress levels. He now stays ahead of the game because he keeps track of the details and can see his next move.”

That kind of success becomes contagious.

“When you put visual cues in front of sales people and they can see what to take action on next, it brings out the best,” says Nichol. “That results in better communication, more closure and, in the end, our customer wins because somebody is communicating with them.”

Nichol attributes that transformation to the Visual Sales Pipeline. “Because once it’s there, you’ve got to manage it. That begins to instill some accountability. And I would say that in the last three years, while we’ve been using Anvil, I’ve seen nothing but growth in revenue.”