Southern Marketing Affiliates Boosts Sales Effectiveness With White Cup BI
Southern Marketing Affiliates (SMA), a family-owned agricultural parts distributor supplying customers across the United States from four locations, is known for serving the market with a commitment to quality and customer service. Its products include major parts brands as well as its own private labels, including TISCO, a trusted tractor parts supplier. As SMA grew, so did the complexity of managing its vast customer base and sales operations. To maintain their competitive edge, SMA needed a tool that could scale with them, enhancing visibility into their sales data and able to provide actionable insights across all levels of their organization. Adopting MITS BI and later White Cup BI in the cloud met their immediate needs and has become an essential part of their sales strategy.
Improved reporting flexibility
Enhanced decision-making
Significant time savings
Challenges Before White Cup BI
Prior to implementing MITS BI (now White Cup BI) SMA faced significant challenges with their existing reporting tools. Epicor Business Analyzer was not user-friendly and didn’t give the company’s territory managers the visibility they needed. These managers on the front lines of sales found it difficult to access the data they needed to effectively manage their accounts, or to support their teams in driving meaningful sales conversations.
This lack of detailed visibility into customer performance at the ship-to level made it challenging for the sales team to gauge new products’ success or to tailor their strategies to individual customer needs. For example, since they couldn’t track which specific customer locations generated sales last year, it was difficult to proactively ensure they retained that business in the periods that followed.
“We wanted to be able to provide ship-to level details of how our territory managers’ customers were performing so they could start taking ownership of their properties,” said Luke Gazaway, National Sales Director at SMA. ”
Luke Gazaway
National Sales Director
Southern Marketing Affiliates
White Cup BI Empowers Territory Managers
With the implementation of White Cup BI, SMA was immediately able to address these challenges head-on. White Cup BI turned their ERP data into the actionable insights the sales team needed to drive growth proactively and engage more effectively with their customers.
One of the first things SMA did was create a snapshot of high-level sales data, as well as an overview of performance by product and product category. The ability to drill down into bookings and order history put territory managers more in control of how they spent their time so they were calling on the right people. Rather than seeing the same customers every month, they could look back at their past sales history and see that they got a big order from a customer at this time the previous year so they could call on that company again.
“It gave them a forward-looking mentality in the field,” Gazaway said. “They’re more proactive than they were previously.”
Today, every territory manager receives a daily report from White Cup BI showing sales trends, but they frequently log in throughout the day to prepare for customer calls as well.
This enhanced visibility allows the sales team to have much more relevant, pointed conversations with customers so they can sell more effectively.
Driving Growth Through Data-Informed Insights
Since implementing White Cup BI over 10 years ago, SMA has experienced significant growth. Gazaway sees a clear correlation between better, and better access to, customer data and the sales team’s ability to win more deals, growing revenues and customer relationships.
“It definitely makes my life easier. You get to make more informed decisions, more specific decisions, faster.”
For example, evaluating the performance of a new product and deciding whether to expand that product line is driven by data, rather than gut feeling.
“You can go by product group and supplier to see how many customers actually adopted that product group, was our fill rate as good as we thought?” Gazaway said. “Having the ability to put all that on one report and see it side by side is valuable.”
In addition to informing decisions that drive sales growth, the warehouse and purchasing teams use White Cup BI for inventory control and ordering. The accounting team also uses it to manage accounts receivable and quickly identify past-due invoices.
The data-driven mindset the company has developed since using White Cup BI has even influenced how they approach potential acquisitions and new growth opportunities.
“(When we look at companies we’re considering acquiring), I’m always saying to our exec team, ‘Man, I wish we could just get their data into White Cup BI so we actually understood what was going on.”
Gain A Competitive Edge With White Cup BI
Southern Marketing Affiliates’ journey with White Cup BI highlights the transformative power of equipping distribution sales teams with business intelligence. By transforming mountains of ERP data into detailed insights and easy-to-use tools, White Cup BI empowers SMA’s sales team to engage more effectively with their customers. As the company continues to scale and expand, White Cup BI will remain a crucial component of their strategy, enabling them to stay ahead in a competitive market.
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