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$350K/month revenue increase |
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45% increase in process efficiency |
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Standardized data collection |
Southern States Toyotalift (SSTlift) is an authorized Toyota Forklift dealer offering a full line of material handling products in Florida and Georgia, US. That includes forklifts, reach trucks, or pallet jacks, along with fleet management services and advanced automation engineering and design.
As the company’s sales process still heavily depends on on-site offline sales, they implemented Resco Field Sales+ on top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM a few years ago. The solution has helped the sales department take advantage of their CRM on the road and work with essential information, even in offline scenarios.
After the first successful integration of mobility into their sales operations, managers started to look for something that would also digitize on-site surveys and questionnaires. They wanted to further streamline order management in the field and eliminate the need for pen & paper.
To solve that, Southern States Toyotalift adopted Resco Inspections+. Once combined with Resco Field Sales+ and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the company saw a 45% increase in process efficiency and a $350k monthly revenue increase, along with other benefits—optimized workflows, lower costs, and improved adoption of digital technology across the company.
Business challenge
For over 70 years, Southern States Toyotalift has helped customers gain a competitive advantage.
Their commitment to quality, reliability, and customer satisfaction, the hallmark of the Toyota Production System, extends to all Florida and Georgia branches and more than 230 Toyota Material Handling locations across North America.
However, the company’s success also comes with one specific for the internet era. As SSTlift’s Corporate Marketing Manager Jason Johnson explained during his Resco Next 2019 session, their sales still heavily depend on on-site offline sales.
What was happening was that we would have a salesperson who went out to customer number one. They took pictures of the equipment. They’re writing down notes because they don’t want to fire up their laptop to utilize the Excel spreadsheet in front of the customer.
They do five, six, seven, eight, nine of those. And at the end of the day, they come home, plug in their phone to their computer, have to take the photos, sort the photos out, copy and paste them into an Excel spreadsheet.
Then, go back to their notes, type in the forklift details into the Excel spreadsheet, and email that to the wholesale manager. The manager would then take that, pull a couple of photos out, post that to the wholesale auction network, and try to sell,Jason Johnson, Corporate Marketing Manager at Southern States Toyotalift.
This had become a growing problem over time as the company had to manage thick folders of sheets for every order. The process was ineffective for time management and administration of data, resulting in wasting work time and money on laborious digitization. And so, the organization started to look for a more practical solution.
For us, the offline capability was non-negotiable. We needed a solution that could be cross-platform. It had to be able to deploy on iOS, Android, and Microsoft Surface, which is what our field sales staff utilizes,Jason reveals.
Solution
Initially, the company decided to develop an in-house app that would streamline data collection. But after a long development period and tens of thousands of dollars spent, they found themselves at square one. The project was heading to a dead end without a reliable solution in sight.
Fortunately, the team also worked on a backup plan simultaneously.
Jason led the talks with Resco and Higgins One on possible solutions. The partnership was built on strong foundations as the team at Higgins One had already successfully implemented Resco Field Sales+ for MS Dynamics.
We had this conversation with Jason before, that why don’t we just build this application from scratch? A mobile app, right? And for us, it’s always about time and cost.
Because sure, you could do that, and you could design it and build it from whatever your creativity and imagination could come up with, but come back and see me in a year or two, and it’d be very expensive. So that’s where Resco is a partner to us that sets themselves apart even from Microsoft,explained Jeremy Higgins, owner and CEO at Higgins One.
First talks have been initiated during the Resco Next conference in Prague in 2018. There, the idea of Resco Inspections+, further extending the company’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM, started to take shape. With the support of Resco experts and Resco implementation partner Higgins One, Jason and his colleagues have begun to evaluate the solution.
After just a few weeks from the first talks, the Southern States Toyotalift team started to use Resco Inspections+ during their on-site customer and prospect visits.
We chose Resco around three core components: mobility, stability, and flexibility. We started off with Resco “off-the-shelf” and then went to the subscriber version where we began the customization – and that was really critical. We have a number of processes that are unique to us, and we have to work through those. With Resco, I was able to see that we had the capability of going there,Jason reveals.
Benefits
Streamlining a half-hour operation into 4 minutes
Implementing a new mobile solution into their workflow, they were able to add information from their contacts directly via digital forms. As Jason explains, the sales reps now visit dealers and put data into the system with phones or tablets immediately as they are going through the walk-around of their units.
It created an efficiency for us that took what was often a 30-minute to an hour-long process down to about 4 minutes per form,Jason Johnson explained during his presentation at Resco Next conference.
Increasing the revenue by 350K/month
With Resco Inspections+, the sales reps can take photos of vehicles that are synced to Dynamics and available to the back-office team. Furthermore, after filling out the survey, they export two PDF documents, which are automatically sent to the wholesale manager.
The report, which has no customer information and is branded by Southern States Toyotalift, is also sent to an auction network where the company can get live bids on it in no extra time.
And that’s where we saw this increase in revenue because both the salesperson and the wholesale manager have been able to move more efficiently. We’re able to meet the market with information at a speed that wasn’t even real for us before. So, that’s where it accelerated our sales velocity rapidly,Jason added.
Standardized data collection
Resco Inspections+ also helped Toyota to standardize data collection and its format – resulting in optimized workflows, lower costs, and improved adoption of digital technology across the company.