Leveraging Salesforce, Duggan & Brown Streamlines Lead Deliveries to its Sales Staff
Case Study: Duggan & Brown
When looking for ways to help its sales staff discover and foster vendor relationships, established consumer merchandise broker Duggan & Brown turned to Salesforce — Salesforce with a IT Edge CRM twist.
As direct marketing specialists, the Duggan & Brown team is in a class of its own. After more than four decades of remarkable success, Duggan & Brown stands out as one of the few organizations of its kind equipped to discover a steady stream of new merchandise ideas for direct marketers. The company enjoys an enviable track record in tailoring items to this specialized market and capitalizing on each opportunity created. But they needed a Salesforce solution as attentive to their needs as they are to the consumer merchandise market.
Why Duggan & Brown Needed Salesforce
Duggan & Brown has an established base of big box and online retailers for whom they identify vendors with products that will sell in high volumes. To accomplish this, Duggan & Brown’s sales staff needs to both establish new vendor relationships and nurture existing relationships to deliver highly marketable products that will sell well on retailer sales outlets. Once vendors and products are identified, they must be well organized and clearly documented to make it easy for Duggan & Brown’s sales staff to present them to buyers.
Duggan & Brown needed a system that gave their sales staff detailed information about all suitable offerings for every merchandise buyer. With this information, team members can easily track which vendors or products buyers want, don’t want, or have already signed up to buy.
Challenges at Duggan & Brown
Prior to engaging IT Edge to build a custom Salesforce solution, Duggan and Brown’s sales staff had no centralized system to track information about retailers, vendors, or products. There was no way for sales team members to formally share information and no way for management to effectively inform the sales staff when new vendors or products became available. And neither management nor sales had visibility into sales progress.
Furthermore, Duggan & Brown was unable to report back to their vendors on sales status of their products. The company needed a way to communicate efficiently with vendors about sales progress, including the number of pitches that had been made on their behalf with Duggan & Brown’s base of retailers.
IT Edge CRM’s Custom Salesforce Solution
Using Visualforce pages, Apex code, and both Javascript and Jquery technologies, IT Edge CRM created a custom Salesforce system for Duggan & Brown. The system organizes vendor relationships and delivers a Customer Product Review dashboard that functions as the “air traffic control center” for all Duggan & Brown product, vendor, and buyer relationships.
Reaching the Next Level of Sales Performance
With easy access to all appropriate product offerings for specific buyers throughout all Duggan & Brown vendor relationships, sales reps can achieve a new level of effectiveness. They’re able to visualize newly available offerings, track the merchandise buyers’ commitment to purchasing, and follow up tasks triggered as they work within the system. All of these possibilities and tools are right at the sales team’s fingertips — they never have to leave the dashboard.