McCann Industries chooses White Cup over Salesforce and NetSuite
White Cup’s distribution-focused CRM helps to drive McCann’s success
McCann Industries is a family-owned business and market leader in heavy equipment and construction supply sales. What started as a concrete specialties company in Villa Park, Illinois, in 1967, McCann now offers a full range of construction equipment, supplies, and services throughout Chicagoland, northern Indiana, and southwest Michigan.
The McCann customer base includes two different but overlapping segments: heavy equipment sales and construction supply sales. The heavy equipment side has long sales cycles, where the supply side is highly transactional, sometimes with multiple orders from the same customer per day.
“We felt like Salesforce and NetSuite weren’t a good fit for us as a complex supplier and our business model.”
From on-premise to the cloud, White Cup's CRM is still the tool for the job
As the company expanded their offerings beyond concrete forms and supplies, they also outgrew old-school Excel files and SQL reporting. The company selected the construction dealer-focused ERP CDK Global and implemented White Cup’s CRM in 2015. At the time, gaining better visibility into customer accounts and the sales process was key. Their on-premise version of White Cup’s CRM helped the company grow steadily for several years, but as with most technology providers, the prospect of a cloud solution needed to be addressed.
That launched an extensive search to see if there were better options on the market beyond White Cup’s CRM. After considering Salesforce, NetSuite, and eLeads, the McCann team decided to stay with White Cup’s CRM and upgrade to the White Cup Cloud. “We felt like Salesforce and NetSuite weren’t a good fit for us as the amount of time required for customization and creation would be too disruptive to our business,” said Danny, McCann’s IT Manager.
Creative solutions to drive CRM adoption
“From a sales standpoint, the BI piece in White Cup’s CRM is great. My sales manager on the supply side of the business lives and breathes in it. The dashboards are key,” said Poull.
To help the sales team capitalize on the power of White Cup’s CRM, McCann is starting a program to incentivize CRM adoption. While the details are confidential, the goal is to strike a balance between improved visibility and accountability. Although our sales team close rate is extremely high, we need increased visibility onto why we are losing deals, that we are losing. Given the way the business is structured, multiple people are assigned to every account. There may be four or more people on a customer team, including support and customer care team members, as well as heavy equipment and supply sales team members. Updating all the account activity in the CRM allows the entire team to provide a seamless customer experience. This level of communication is critical for such a support and service-driven company.
The McCann team proactively tracks customer accounts in dashboards, making it easy to spot those who have spiked or dropped in spending. When understanding product performance, the team tracks what’s selling and what’s not and evaluates if there is a need for product training or if there are alternative products they should provide to keep up with their customer’s needs.
Seeing success with the CRM in multiple ways
One of the biggest benefits of White Cup’s CRM is that it saves time for the sales leadership. Dashboards help spot problems, identify new opportunities, and provide tangible data for sales coaching.
While identifying quantifiable sales numbers directly attributed to CRM activity is rare, Poull frequently hears how sales reps have used CRM data to bring opportunities to light. For example, identifying a customer who has dropped off buying a particular product raises a red flag. It’s not uncommon to learn that a new purchasing manager at the customer isn’t familiar with McCann’s offerings. The result is a sales call that restores the original sales level and adds on new purchases.
From a technology ROI standpoint, between the cost savings of not having the expense of the on-prem server and the benefits of the White Cup Cloud, McCann is setting themselves up for continued success. Poull closed by saying, “We have a good product in White Cup. We have the dashboards we like, and we’ll just keep improving on them in the cloud.”