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Headquartered in Burlington, Ontario, Martack Specialties is a leading provider of board products such as whiteboard and chalkboard commonly used in office and educational settings. Martack faced increasing cost pressure from the globalization and outsourcing of process manufacturing to low-cost overseas production sites. Until recently, the company’s customer-facing employees had to manually search multiple files in order to carry out routine sales and customer service procedures. To streamline sales and service processes, the company deployed Maximizer, a cost-effective and easy-to-use sales and contact management system. Using the new system, Martack doubled productivity, increased sales by 15% in the first 9 months and reduced paper costs significantly – in addition to providing its customers with an enhanced sales and customer support experience.
Like many small businesses, Martack Specialties was using Excel spreadsheets and paper files to manage their business. They were not alone. Statistics from a top analyst firm, the Yankee Group, have shown that 77% of small businesses are still not using sales and contact management software to manage their business.1 The other 23% are companies leading in their industries and edging out the competition. Martack is now one of those companies. After recognizing the benefits of a sales and contact management system, the company purchased Maximizer and within months, saw sales, productivity and the bottom line metrics improve sharply.
“When I came to this company a little over a year ago, I was surprised to find out that people had to dig through mounds of paper files and sift through endless Excel files just to find some basic customer information,” said Mark Nixon, Inside Sales Manager, Martack Specialties. “It was tedious, unorganized and inefficient. After we implemented Maximizer, productivity instantly jumped 50%, sales increased by 15%, and the level of customer service greatly improved. We are now able to reply to quotes and tenders much faster and with more efficiency.”
Outsourcing Not an Option
If one of the challenges Martack faced was reducing sales and customer service costs, why not consider moving the company’s manufacturing facilities to a country where labor costs are lower? There were a few reasons why a move wasn’t feasible. One, quality could become an issue. “Just because you are suddenly paying lower wages doesn’t mean you’re necessarily going to get the same kind of quality. Not only are the products we manufacture of the highest quality, but they require specialized workers and machinery to produce.” Another factor to consider is the materials required to produce board products like these. “There’s no better place to find the high-quality materials needed to produce whiteboards, chalkboards and tackboards than in Canada, where building materials are readily available and competitively priced. We simply had to operate more efficiently to reduce the costs of servicing our customers.”
With rising customer expectations for a high-quality purchasing experience, fueled by the ease of online Internet research, Martack’s other major focus is improved customer service. In the busy manufacturing sector, it is crucial to be quick to respond to quotes, tenders and questions that customers may have. People were wasting time digging in old paper files for quotes and tenders, faxing the information, then filing it away again. Also hindering efficient customer service was extensive and sometimes exhaustive searching through Outlook email for past communications with customers. And since phone calls were not being logged or tracked, even more information was missing, making proactive customer service challenging.
The Maximizer Solution
With a move out of the question, Martack was left to seek ways to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction without upsetting the momentum of the business. At the extremely reasonable price of $200 a license, Martack purchased Maximizer and instantly saw results. “Maximizer has been the best purchase this company has made in recent years, and the returns have significantly outweighed the cost. Maximizer really is ‘the little engine that could’. I know every small business would benefit from a contact manager like Maximizer.”
With Maximizer, Martack’s customer service representatives are now able to pull up customer records easily and quickly, with only a few clicks of a button. From a customer record, everything that relates to that customer, including all contact information like address, phone number, the contact person at the company, even the rep who’s assigned to that account can be easily accessed in Maximizer. Users can retrieve and review past emails, notes on the account, phone logs, recent quotes and tenders, and even invoices. “We synchronize Maximizer to Outlook so that we can store emails in customer records, saving us immense amounts of time and hassle. Before, it was so tedious trying to find emails for a specific customer. It has also helped to reduce the load on our email servers.”
Now when requests for quotes and tenders come in, Martack enters them in Maximizer as a Hotlist task (for immediate response) or an Opportunity (for a longer-term response), assigns them to the appropriate sales rep, and saves the requested quote or tender in the customer’s record. Sales representatives can then follow up on the Hotlist requests immediately, completing the quote within hours or minutes of receiving the request and, with Maximizer’s fax integration, faxes the quote directly to the customer without using any paper whatsoever. In fact, this has been an excellent cost-saving measure for Martack, as they have significantly reduced the amount of paper they require for quotes and tenders, which can often be as long as 100 pages.
“Since implementing Maximizer almost a year ago, we have hired more sales reps and since they are able to make more phone calls in a day and respond to requests faster, sales have increased by 15%. Now that our time is utilized more efficiently and not wasted searching for customer account information and responding to requests, productivity in the office has increased by as much as 30%. Combine all this with the reduced paper costs and improved customer service, Martack Specialties has significantly improved its bottom line. I don’t know how we survived without Maximizer in the past!”
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