Headquartered in Belleville, Illinois, Egyptian Workspace Partners has been delivering a variety of business products for over 140 years.
"This technology is going to help us act like we have 20 salespeople on the streets when we only have 5. It gives dealers the capacity to operate like a huge dealer, it’s a great equalizer."
Brett Baltz, Director of Business
The Overview.
Having been known and loved as Egyptian Stationers for many years, the company has recently undergone a substantial rebrand, positioning itself as much more than just an office supply dealer.
“The biggest problem we faced was that nobody knew who was buying what. We’d get halfway through the month and we didn’t know who had bought or who hadn’t bought or if we’d lost a customer.”
The Challenge.
Director of Business, Brett Baltz took up his position in the company just over 6 years ago. “My family has owned this company since the 1960s. When I joined the company, the office division was run from a really antiquated point of view and we were using some dated business systems.”
“The biggest problem we faced was that nobody knew who was buying what. We’d get halfway through the month and we didn’t know who had bought or who hadn’t bought or if we’d lost a customer.”
The Solution.
The team at Egyptian Workspace Partners were using Acsellerate but soon reverted back to sales-i for their sales team. Today, the team have also introduced a marketing automation tool, Act-On and SugarCRM to use alongside sales-i.
“In our business, it’s imperative that we can quickly know who’s buying, who’s not buying, where there’s an opportunity and where there’s not,” Brett continues.
“We’re trying to take a lot of the admin off our sales reps. The biggest thing for us was coming up with a better, more efficient way to manage our business.”
"The biggest problem we faced was that nobody knew who was buying what. We’d get halfway through the month and we didn’t know who had bought or who hadn’t bought or if we’d lost a customer."
Brett Baltz, Director of Business
The Results.
Brett and the team at Egyptian Workspace Partners have been using sales-i since 2013 and are currently working on an integration between their three business systems: sales-i, SugarCRM and Act-On.
The visibility that sales-i provides for each customer has had a hugely positive impact on the business: “If somebody’s not buying, it’s easier to go back in at day 60 to get the customer back than to go back in at day 180. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that we have been able to pick up just by telling our story a little better. We’re not just an office supplies company; we sell janitorial supplies, safety supplies and breakroom products.”
“We have a lot of accounts that are in that $5,000-$15,000 range that is spending $300 or $400 a month and it’s extremely inefficient to go and ask for another $60 a month of coffee. This is where I can really see the Campaigns in sales-i working in harmony with Act-On and SugarCRM.”
Using sales-i alongside Act-On allows for consistency across the board and ensures regularity of relevant customer communications: “I as a manager can’t be with every sales rep on every call. I can’t control what they do on these appointments. sales-i does a great job at reporting and allowing us to find out who’s buying coffee, who’s not buying copy paper or whatever you need to know about a customer.”
There’s no denying that the team at Egyptian Workspace Partners know their market inside out: “We know that every customer is different and we can’t go into a customer with a coupon or flyer for copy paper if they already buy copy paper from us. What you push is different every month for every customer and this is what these tools are allowing us to exploit.”
Brett plans to begin using Act-On to engage with their customers more frequently, with more relevant messaging. “Act-On allows us to get a message to our customers based on the information we can get from sales-i about what they’re buying and what they’re not buying.” A key benefit is that Act-On marketing campaign results flow back to SugarCRM for salespeople to use in their customer follow-up process.
The Future.
As the three-pronged program gets underway at Egyptian Workspace Partners, Brett is hoping for one thing: to grow sales.
“It’s going to help us in a lot of areas and will hopefully streamline some processes that we’re still doing manually. At a minimum, we want to be increasing categories with different customers, helping us pick up customers who used to buy or brand new customers and sell more to existing customers. That’s ultimately the bottom line of what we’re trying to achieve.”
“We can grow as a business with these tools and not have to add a whole lot more expense. This technology is going to help us act like we have 20 salespeople on the streets when we only have 5. It gives dealers the capacity to operate like a huge dealer, it’s a great equalizer.”
This case study was created in partnership with CRM International, a longstanding partner of sales-i and strategic consultant, CRM and marketing automation partner to Egyptian Workspace Partners.
