Online sales analytics and CRM solution Vecta has enabled Olympic Fixings MD Paul Gordon to spend more time managing and directing his business - rather than chasing data…
Olympic Fixings was founded in 1989 and supplies British and Irish merchants and wholesalers from distribution centres in Accrington and Bangor, with over 3,500 catalogued and stocked SKUs.
Vecta stores a company’s data in the cloud and is accessible by sales and management teams over the internet. It combines transactional data from a company’s ERP system with customer and contact records to deliver an instant and comprehensive picture of performance, margins and opportunities directly to desktops, tablets or smartphones.
Olympic Fixings MD Paul Gordon says the Vecta implementation went smoothly, all timelines were met and the training provided by the Vecta team was very good. “Our team adopted the technology very quickly,” he says, “even those who were completely unfamiliar with using tablets.” Vecta has revolutionised the ability to capture customer information at Olympic. The fixings firm’s boss says: “Before Vecta, the only thing we knew internally about our customers was where to send their invoice. Now we have several thousand email addresses and we’ve been able to engage in direct marketing campaigns to key customer contacts where we send special offers and get orders in return. Previously the only way we sold was through direct selling from the rep, so Vecta has facilitated a more multi-channel approach.”
The analytics functionality of Vecta has also enabled Gordon and his management team to interrogate the business and, if they spot any variants, to drill down and investigate. “Before Vecta, we had to pull reports out of our ERP system and look at them in Excel – it was all very time consuming.” Gordon and his finance and sales directors have their Vecta dashboards tuned to consistently show them performance by sales rep or by product. “If anything is off track we can quickly investigate it ourselves now rather than having to ask other colleagues to produce reports from the ERP system. From a selling perspective it’s really helpful. Vecta can also alert us to link and upselling opportunities that we will take full advantage of, as well as gap analysis and customer branch comparisons - which I know will be a real opportunity for us.”
Vecta dashboards can be customised according to the user’s role and the company’s preference. Gordon adds: “The most useful view for me and my Finance Director is the margin analysis. It’s such an easy tool as we can pin down any variances very quickly - to one transaction if needed. I’m frequently away from the office on business and Vecta lets me see what’s happening in the business at any time without making loads of phone calls or sending emails. It’s enabled me to spend more time managing and directing my business rather than having to waste time chasing data.”
