Tour de Force Success Stories: Jet Dock Systems

Tour de Force Success Stories: Jet Dock Systems

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A key factor in the performance of the sales team at Jet Dock Systems, Cleveland, Ohio, is how fast they can generate quotes. The company’s drive on docks come in a wide range of types, sizes, and styles, and providing a customer with many different options often helps close the sale. In the past, the complexity of the quotes and associated contracts made it necessary to produce them manually, which took about 5 minutes for each one.

Recently, the company has implemented a new Outlook-based customer relationship management (CRM) system that can draw products and other information from many business management systems and makes it easy to create and populate custom documents. The new software reduces the time need for the sales team to generate 12 quotes for a single customer from one hour to under 10 minutes. The ability to generate quotes more quickly has helped increased the average revenues per order by 9% by making it possible to present the customer with more alternatives. Because the sales staff is operating at full capacity during the company’s busy season, managers also expect the ability to generate more quotes to significantly increase the number of orders.

Drive-on docks from Jet Dock Systems provide a far more convenient dry-dock for personal watercraft, outboard boats, stern drives, jet boats, and inboard ski boats than conventional lifts. To get a boat on top of a Jet Dock, simply approach the dock at idle speed and allow the boat’s momentum to begin to carry it onto the dock. From here, gently apply the throttle to hold your boat in the "safety pause" position, about 1/3rd of the way on the dock. Then, firmly throttle the boat the rest of the way onto the dock. To launch the boat, simply lower the drive unit, shift into reverse, and drive off the dock. Drive-on docks make it so much easier to dock and launch boats that many owners use their craft three times more than before they started using them. The docks protect hulls and engines just as well as conventional dry docks.

Jet Dock Systems’ sales team typically communicates with boat owners either by phone or email. The first step in the sales process is obtaining information about the customer’s boat and mooring site. This information determines which of the company’s products are applicable. Then the sales team typically provides quotes to the customer. Since there are many different possible configurations and also a considerable number of options available, a number of different quotes are usually needed to provide the customer with a full understanding of the available choices.

Previous approaches to CRM

Jet Dock Systems began using contact management software to track its customers and sales opportunities soon after the company was founded about 10 years ago. “Our original software package didn’t do a lot more than track customer information and contacts,” said Tom Tang, Information Technology Manager for Jet Dock Systems. “We finally gave up on the product because we had so much difficulty consolidating the databases maintained by the different members of our sales staff. We evaluated full-blown CRM systems and selected the leading mid-market system. As we began the implementation process, we discovered that a considerable amount of customization was required to adapt the product to our needs.”

Over a period of three years, Jet Dock Systems spent over $20,000 on customizing the product but managers still felt that the previous product was a long way from meeting the company’s needs. Still to be done was the important task of integrating the CRM system with Solomon accounting software used by Jet Dock Systems. This integration was very important because the company is continually making changes to its product line and pricing and without integration these changes had to be entered by hand into two different systems. Another major concern was that the previous CRM product did not integrate well with email, which was playing an increasingly important role in the company’s sales process.

Selecting and adapting new software

Two years ago, the company decided to look again at CRM alternatives. “My Solomon value added reseller had heard that MRH Technology Group was about to introduce Tour de Force, a CRM software package that can be integrated with Solomon as well as other accounting software,” Tang said. “The biggest advantage is the flexibility offered by the software to change the data stored by the program and the way it appears. You can easily set it up to look the way you want and run the way you want. We like the way that Tour de Force integrates with Exchange Server and operates as an add-in to Outlook. Any email that is exchanged with a customer is automatically logged into the program, providing an easy to follow history of our interactions.”

Without the need for any consulting fees, Bill Beatty, Sales Manager for the company, customized the software to adapt to the company’s way of working. He added fields to the customer records to track the type of boat or boats and mooring site used by each customer. This information is entered when the salesperson first speaks to each customer. He configured the software to pull product and pricing information from Solomon accounting software. He also configured the software to handle the multiple addresses, emails, and phone numbers used by many customers.

For example, a customer might want the dock installed at his lake home where he keeps his boat but want the invoice sent to his business address. Beatty created templates to generate quotes that can be emailed to customers in seconds. The quotes are completely customized with the company’s products. The quote also incorporates a contract that includes information specific to the sale such as the customer and product information.

“It’s so easy to create and modify these templates that we could make changes on almost a weekly basis as our sales people and executives make suggestions on how we can improve our sales process,” Tang said.

"Later, if the salesperson talks to the customer, he or she can see a record of any service calls, any installation, or warrantee issues, etc. The basic idea is that everyone can see what everyone else is doing.” Tom Tang, Jet Dock IT Manager

Tang said that the integration of Tour de Force with Microsoft Outlook improves communications within his company. “Every email sent by anyone in our organization to a customer is automatically logged into the customer’s record,” he said. “So, for example, the customer will typically email photos of their mooring site during the sales process. Later, our installer will take photos of the installed dock and add those to the customer record. If the customer later calls in with a problem, any company representative the customer reaches can go into their account and call up the photos as well as the correspondence and notes between the customer and the installers and salesperson. Later, if the salesperson talks to the customer, he or she can see a record of any service calls, any installation, or warrantee issues, etc. The basic idea is that everyone can see what everyone else is doing.”

Streamlining quoting boosts sales

The process of creating a quote has been speeded up to the point that sales people typically generate multiple quotes right while they are on the phone taking to customers:

“It takes about 5 minutes on the telephone to get all of the information that we need from the customer, such as the type of boat and mooring site,” said Bill Beatty, Sales Manager for the company. “With this information entered, the sales person can generate quotes in about 30 seconds each simply by selecting products from a pick list and pushing a button and generate the actual document for the customer. It has become possible to generate quotes so quickly that the sales people are producing more quotes than in the past, showing customers different mooring options, security systems, and other choices. In the past, it took so long to produce a quote that the sales person would typically talk the customer, find out what they thought they wanted, and send them a single quote. Now the sales person can offer a much wider range of choices and the average sale has increased by 9%.”

Beatty said that the ability to generate quotes in much less time should also help the company increase its revenues during its spring and summer busy season. Each salesman produces an average of 5,000 quotes per year between their hundreds of prospects and something on the order of 19% of those prospects turn into customers. “During the busy season, salespeople spend most of their time talking to customers and producing quotes,” Beatty said. “There’s only 24 hours in a day so it makes sense that by reducing the time required to make quotes we will increase the time available to talk to customers. We have no idea how many additional orders we will be able to gain but we suspect it will be a substantial number. This helps explain why our sales team loves this new CRM system. They understand that it is helping to increase their income.”