How Elixir helps Remotec to outsmart their competitors

Remotec is a Belgian company, active in the construction industry since 1988. They provide solutions for signalisation, road markings, collision protection & demarcations, illuminated signs & branding, infrastructure works, charging solutions for cars and bicycles, wayfinding and digital LED screens. Remotec owns the entire process going from solution design and production to installation and maintenance.

The challenges

The company has been growing fast, both organically and through targeted acquisitions. All growing companies face some new challenges for their commercial teams, sooner or later. So did Remotec.

Remotec’s commercial organization consists of multiple teams such as marketing, sales, and back office. The sales & back office team were functioning quite apart from the marketing team, working with separate systems and processes.

This resulted in inconsistency of data and important information being spread over different places. Data and information that could have been useful for marketing to further optimize their actions, for sales to detect new opportunities, and improve the productivity of both.

In order to support their processes, Remotec needed to:

• Introduce a more structured and aligned lead management and sales processes
• Increase internal efficiency through more automation of these processes
• Become more data driven to have a more complete view on the customer across the teams and make more informed decisions

This case study explains how Remotec has addressed their challenges with the support of Elixir.

Solution

As for all our projects, we started with a thorough functional and technical assessment to align on the project approach together with Remotec. During this assessment, we conducted interviews with stakeholders from the management, sales, marketing and back office teams to get more information on the strategic ambitions and potential implementation challenges, as well as the existing data and IT infrastructure.

Based on this assessment, we recommended a solution covering recommendations on:

1. Processes
2. Technology
3. People

Taking into account these 3 components was key to delivering a holistic solution that could really make a difference. Below, you’ll read about the improvements that were implemented on each level.

1. Processes

The first important step was to redefine the commercial processes, ensuring more alignment between them.

Together with Remotec, we looked at the current ways of working in order to uncover gaps in these processes. We noticed that we had to make sure that good quality leads didn’t fall through the cracks and that quotes weren’t lost because of insufficient follow-up.

To improve this, a detailed mapping of the to-be processes was done together, to determine how:

• New leads are generated by marketing
• They are nurtured, qualified and passed on to sales
• These leads are then followed-up by sales
• Quotes are created, followed-up on, and converted into orders
• This information is passed back to marketing, to close the feedback loop

Additionally, we advised Remotec on a thoughtful data governance process, with best practices on how to avoid data pollution.

Next to that, we looked at how the technology infrastructure had to be improved, in order to support these new processes, bringing us to the next topic.

2. Technology

While assessing Remotec’s current IT architecture, two important things became clear:

1. Sales and back office would benefit from using a CRM system, to increase productivity and centralize customer information and communications.

HubSpot was an easy choice as new CRM since:

• The marketing team was already working with its marketing features. This would help to align the marketing, sales and back office on the same platform.
• It is a powerful tool, but user-friendly enough to ensure a smooth onboarding of new users.
  

2. Data from Remotec’s existing ERP (Sage100) could be leveraged in HubSpot, through an integration, to have customer data centralized in one place and to optimize the marketing initiatives.

It would close the feedback loop from sales to marketing, providing better insights in which campaigns work best.

3. People

The third and maybe even most important component of this project was: the employees, an organization’s most valuable asset.

Together with Remotec we looked at tasks of the marketing, sales and back office teams and mainly came to the conclusion that the back office role could be extended. In practice, this meant that:

• Back office would watch over data governance processes and data quality. A crucial task to avoid data pollution in the systems.
• Back office could take over some tasks from the sales team, such as contacting leads for scheduling meetings, registering new customers, or sending out quotes to (smaller) customers.

Implementing new processes and technology is only a success when the people have actually adopted these as intended.

For Remotec, it was important to give training to the user types that would work on HubSpot CRM and the ERP-integration. The Elixir Solutions team went on-site for multiple training sessions for the sales team, backoffice team and the system admin users.

These trainings consisted of a detailed explanation of the new processes and how to follow them in HubSpot and Sage100, and practical exercises to make sure the users got familiar with using HubSpot.

Results

Together with Elixir, Remotec managed to implement the new processes and provide a solution which the different commercial teams were quickly able to adopt, and that was working well for them.

The solution provided by Elixir helped to solve their challenges by:

• Improving sales productivity with a powerful CRM platform
• Centralizing company and contact data from the marketing, sales & back office teams
• Being able to use quote & order data from the ERP in HubSpot, to improve marketing & sales initiatives even more