FAN Welding is a leading supplier of automotive body repair equipment, including high quality European spot welders, MIG welders, plasma cutters, panel removal tools, dent repair tools and high-tech battery charging systems. It also offers maintenance and servicing for all equipment.

The company has 25 employees in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth including 11 account managers and four service technicians in the field.

Effective management of customer information is critical to any business. But as its sales presence – and therefore the number of staff coming into contact with customers – expanded, FAN Welding made customer relationship management a vital component of its strategy going forward.

Until recently, customer contact information resided with individual account managers in the field. The information was neither synchronised nor centralised, which posed a challenge for sales pipeline and performance management.

As Dennis Webb, national sales manager at FAN Welding, explains, “As the national sales manager, collating information on prospective sales volumes and how we were positioned in terms of sales pipeline was a real challenge.

There was also a management interest in monitoring the activity of the sales force as even the server version of Microsoft Outlook didn’t allow us to look at sales people’s calendars and dissect field force activities very easily.”

FAN Welding also required a solution capable of drawing information from other applications, including The Service Manager (TSM) which is used to manage detailed equipment servicing information.

“As multiple people in the organisation needed access to the data, it made sense to create a single system to pool all the information that is needed in their day-to-day work,” said Webb.

The company viewed a centralised system as the way to negotiate increasingly complex customer relationships.

FAN Welding evaluated several alternatives before selecting FrontRange Solutions’ GoldMine customer relationship management (CRM). The company selected GoldMine primarily due to previous experience with the solution.

“GoldMine seemed more comprehensive in its ability to manage other information in addition to that used for relationship management, such as electronic brochures for staff,” said Gary Locke, managing director of FAN Welding.

Ease-of-use also played a key role in the decision. “The great thing about GoldMine is that you can view and interrogate the information in basic, intermediate and advanced formats, depending on the skill level of staff,” added Webb.

Since implementing GoldMine, the company has established a single repository for its most commonly used information, which has assisted in everything from organising meetings to managing day-to-day workflows.

“When TSM synchronises with GoldMine, all pending scheduled service calls appear as service items that the technician will complete in the ‘pending’ tab in GoldMine. When the service is completed in TSM, GoldMine automatically updates the pending item and moves it to customer history, which again is visible by anyone in the company,” said Webb.

The flexibility of GoldMine also means it can act as a repository for non-customer information as well. “We’re using the InfoCenter functionality as a mini-Intranet where we can post information and electronic brochures. This has been a very cost-effective solution for us,” said Locke.

GoldMine has also improved management of FAN Welding’s sales pipeline. “We’ve been able to recreate the various steps of the sales process as stages within GoldMine, so the account managers know the process they have to complete. It has made them more methodical and committed to the sales process, and also more mindful of the pipeline than before,” explained Webb.

“With the more methodical approach to sales, we have also noticed our revenue stream is smoother and our cashflow more regulated,” said Locke.

For more information
FrontRange Solutions
www.FrontRange.com.au
Ph: +61 2 8080 3300

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