Joe Harper, Harper, Inc.
Learn how a small family business implemented SugarCRM to reinvent their company in under 6 months and drive sales over 10 million dollars. Starting with a fully manual paper based business process, Harper Inc. implemented SugarCRM Professional and achieved results that most companies can only dream of. Using SugarCRM, they met all 4 of their business objectives: 1.GROW the business by 30% (Attain sales of $10 Million), 2.INCREASE customer service before, during, and after the sale 3.DRIVE sales growth with cross product marketing 4.MEASURE Everything! Then do something meaningful with what we measure.
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1. Looking Big
How a 2 person family business
reinvented its self in 6 months with
SugarCRM
2. Who is this guy?
Joe Harper
• COO – Harper Inc.
• VP of Marketing – Harper Inc.
• Accountant – Harper Inc.
• Director of Customer Service – Harper Inc.
• Sugar CRM “Guy” – Harper Inc.
Joe Harper
• Director Of Marketing – Milner / Comsquared
• Manager of CRM and Marketing Automation for a sales
team of over 100
5. Harper Inc. The leading supplier of in-store
manufacturing equipment for modern paint and coatings
retailers worldwide. With a focus on superior service and
sales support, Harper Inc. boasts a customer base of
over 30,000 retail locations.
• Computer aided color matching
• Manual and computer aided tint dispensing
• A full range of mixing and shaking equipment
6. Our Industry
• $120 Billion in sales for 2012
• Over 250,000 retail outlets world wide
• Growth every year during the economic down turn
• Consolidation is everywhere
• Environmental concerns are driving changes
7. Business was good
• 6.6 Million in sales
• Year over year growth for the past decade
But we had a problem
• 14+ hour days
• The majority of our days spent doing “work” involved with sales
• No value to our brand in our industry
• Growth not keeping pace with our industry
10. Our business B.S.
• 1,200 to 1,800 orders each year via:
– Email, Phone, and Trade Shows
• All typed on company letterhead in word
• Printed and faxed to our vendors
• End of the month reports hand typed into excel
• Month-end consolidation took a week
• Year end took nearly 3 weeks
• Marketing = 0%
• Misery - Won’t even work here…
(Before SugarCRM)
11. Our Goals
• GROW sales 30%
• INCREASE customer service and brand awareness
• DRIVE sales with email marketing
• MEASURE Everything!
– Then do something meaningful with what we measure.
*While DECREASING our work load and WITHOUT
increasing head count
12. Why SugarCRM
• Full disclosure – It’s the devil I know…
• Adaptability – Open Source
• Scalable
• Cloud based
• Marketing baked in
• Workflow management
• Solution cost
13. Our Business A.S.
• On pace for over 2,500 orders in 2013
• Order processing time reduced by over 90%
• End of the month reports sent to me auto-
magically!TM on the first of the month.
• Month end takes less than 2 hours
• Year end reports are also Auto-magical!TM
• Marketing = 100%
• Misery – Can’t Hack it at Harper Inc.
(After SugarCRM)
14. You are what you do most
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Repeat customers
Average sale value
(in thousands)
Processing orders
(hours)
Average daily sales
volume
Husband and Daddy
15. Making “Work-Flow”
Sugar fixed it all right out of the box
Leads became accounts, accounts and orders
became reports. Auto-magicaly!TM
But it can do MORE!
• Customers buying solution A are now offered
companion solution B! Auto-magicaly!TM
19. Send the right message
Product A
Purchased
• Purchase
triggers
workflow
Relevant
email 1
• The
workflow
sends an
alert email
Relevant
email 2
• The
workflow
can go on
and on
“After time passes” workflow
At the end of each workflow,
the last “action” checks a box
triggering the next “after time
passes” workflow in the series.
So thanks for coming to my talk! Director of Marketing at Milner – 500 employees 100 sales peopleRolled out CRM to 2 of the 3 major sales groups.However, this is not where I work today. I Left to build the next phase of my family’s business in a partnership with my dad.He had built a company and it has grown to be the leader in his primary vertical market. To Grow more he needed Marketing, organization and some real technical know how. So now I am the COO of Harper Inc, and the Marketing Director, and the Accountant, and the Director of Customer Service and the CRM “Guy”Oh yeah and somewhere in all this I am also:
So what is Harper Inc.?We are the premier supplier of paint equipment for independent hardware dealers the world over. This includes retailer groups such as Ace Hardware, True Value, Do-it-Best and the like. We have over 30,000 retail customers the world over.So we sell the equipment that hardware stores use to create the custom paint colors that you want to make your walls match your couch, drapes or what have you..
Our industry may not seem big and it’s not. It’s HUGE!We are a tiny speck in a huge economy of paint manufactures, distributors, dealers and equipment makers. This is a huge deal as we have to really look big to stand out in such a big place. And we did a pretty good job at this by doing something novel, we offer store owners real actual personal service… but with such a big market how can 2 people continue to grow 30% without having service slip? This question is what lead to SugarCRM.
Business was good… when I joined the company we had annual sales of 6.6 Million and over a decade of year over year growth.However, as the business grew no processes were ever put in place to manage the ever growing workload. Which lead to 14 hour days, Tons of PAPER work and stunted growth due to a loss of focus on what we do best which is sell. And did I mention 14 hour days?With that work load, it was hard to find any time for my other ventures such as:
14 Hour days are pretty unacceptable with my co workers at my other job.
And don’t get me started with how my other boss felt about the long days…
Why we chose SugarCRM:We needed a solution that we could roll out in a short period of time. In a small company everyone has to contribute to deliver the results you need. I had implemented Sugar at a larger company for several teams with great success. The reason it was a fit for a company of 500 is the same reason it was a fit for my company of 2.Sugar is Adaptable – Right out of the box sugar is powerful and delivers the features that most users need. However as it is open source you can mold it to fit almost any business process. For our company, Sugar is our Line of business software.Sugar can scale - from my experience it scales up just as well as it scales down. Through customizations we were able to slim down sugar to cover our needs without having a solution that had way more features than we needed. Sugar offered the cloud based platform that my company needed. Not only do we not have servers and dedicated IP’s but we have no interest in having them! As you saw in my profile I have enough titles already. The position of CTO at Harper Inc. does not pay well.Marketing is baked right in! there is no immediate need to seek out a marketing solution to augment the offering from Sugar. (Though I cannot say enough about Pardot and what they have to offer! But that is another conversation)Sugar offers a robust and feature rich workflow environment. SugarCRM Workflow combined with alerts makes it possible to automate your marketing!Last but not least, Solution cost. With a small company ever aspect of your business must justify it’s self every day. Sugar has a fair and straight forward value that cannot be beat.
So from the chart here showing the amount of hours spent by different tasks in January. Harper Inc. was an order processing company that dabbled in sales. However with Sugar CRM we were able to implement a few sales and marketing initiatives that allowed us to quickly flip the script. By June we were a sales company that did a bit of processing here and there. The real win was finding ways to increase or real output while making room for my other job!
Google defines spam is either a noun used to describe canned meat which we wont be covering in this talk today. Or more appropriately as a verb used to describe large numbers or emails sent indiscriminately to recipients. Most marketing emails you see on an average day will truly be nothing more than this. To any email marketer out there I can assure you that even if you think your email is timely, relevant, specific, personalized and succinct. Most of the people receiving it think of it as nothing more than spam. So we as a company made some changes. We wanted to stop emailing our lists as if they were getting ads thrown at them. We wanted our customers to feel like they were having a conversation with our company about a product that they bought. This lead us to use the workflow manager in a different way that perhaps not all of you are doing today.
Sugar is a powerful CRM system but by using workflows and alert emails together you can accomplish tasks normally associated with expensive add-on solutions. The “after time passes” option can be leveraged to complete entire drip campaigns.
First off, even after carefully profiling our customers for blast emails (Sounds ridiculous but we really did try!) our open rates were abysmal. We would see 10-20% open rates and maybe 1%-2% click rates. As you can imagine this lead to nearly ZERO sales. The problem was not product and it was not