Olympic Fixings

About Olympic Fixings

Olympic Fixings was founded in 1989 and supplies British and Irish merchants from distribution centres in Accrington and Bangor with over 3,500 catalogued and stocked SKUs. A trusted brand among electrical wholesalers, tool and plant hire businesses, builders’, plumbers’ and agricultural merchants, the Olympic product offering includes all types of fixings, drill bits and blades, cutting and abrasive products, hand tools, sealants and cleaning products. Customers are served by a 20-strong, highly experienced field sales team and can also use the company’s online catalogue that shows their own negotiated prices.

Vecta, the on-line sales analytics and CRM solution, has enabled Paul Gordon, managing director of Olympic Fixings, to spend more time managing and directing his business - rather than chasing data!

Vecta stores a company’s data in the cloud and is accessible by sales and management teams over the internet. Uniquely, it combines transactional data from a company’s ERP system with customer and contact records to deliver an instant and comprehensive picture of performance, margins and opportunities directly to desktops, tablets or smartphones.

'Our sales team were previously using manual systems to report and record their activity, so effectively we had no visibility from a CRM perspective. We had recently upgraded our ERP, which enabled us to integrate with a CRM system and so we looked closely at three providers,' Paul said.

In addition to the functionality Vecta gave us, we discovered it was also successfully integrated with another user of our ERP system and this proven link gave us extra confidence in its implementation.

Paul Gordon - Managing Director at Olympic Fixings

There are now 40 Vecta users at Olympic Fixings including the management team and all field and internal sales staff. Paul said that implementation went smoothly, all timelines were met and the training provided by the Vecta team was very good.

Our team adopted the technology very quickly even those who were completely unfamiliar with using tablets. Our marketing manager took on the role of ‘Super User’ and championed the implementation of Vecta across the business.

Paul Gordon - Managing Director at Olympic Fixings

Vecta has revolutionised the ability to capture customer information at Olympic.

Before Vecta, the only thing we knew internally about our customers was where to send their invoice!

Now we have several thousand email addresses and we’ve been able to engage in direct marketing campaigns to key customer contacts where we send special offers and get orders in return!

Previously the only way we sold was through direct selling from the rep, so Vecta has facilitated a more multi channel approach.

Paul Gordon - Managing Director at Olympic Fixings

Results

• Vecta has enabled multi-channel selling with direct mail campaigns resulting in orders by return
• Managers now investigate variants themselves rather than asking colleagues to create reports for analysis
• Vecta delivers link and upselling opportunities, as well as gap analysis and customer branch comparison data
• Variances can be investigated quickly using Vecta’s margin report

The analytics functionality of Vecta has also enabled Paul and his management team to interrogate the business and, if they spot any variants, to drill down and investigate. 

Paul explained that, 'Before Vecta, we had to pull reports out of our ERP system and look at  them in Excel – it was all very time consuming. For example, recently, I looked at my margin rate for the month and saw that it had dipped.'

He was concerned over what might have happened but, 'within a few clicks I could see that, because we were clearing a particular line at effectively a negative margin and it was going very well, this was what was having an impact on the margin.'

'Vecta quickly confirmed that, rather than having a margin problem, it was just something we had planned to do,' he said.

Paul and his finance and sales directors have their Vecta dashboards tuned to consistently show them performance by sales rep or by product.

If anything is off track we can quickly investigate it ourselves now rather than having to ask other colleagues to produce reports from the ERP system.

From a selling perspective it’s really helpful. Vecta can also alert us to link and upselling opportunities that we will take full advantage of, as well as gap analysis and customer branch comparisons - which I know will be a real opportunity for us.

Paul Gordon - Managing Director at Olympic Fixings

Paul has also discovered that Vecta ensures the ‘intellectual property’ of a salesman remains within the company.

When a new sales person started last year, before we had started using Vecta, it was like he was working in virgin territory even though he was visiting established customers!

Paul Gordon - Managing Director at Olympic Fixings

'The old rep had taken all our knowledge of customer issues, buying patterns etc with him. Now any new starter can be briefed and armed with all the customer information he needs via Vecta, and can walk in with total confidence,' he explained.

Vecta dashboards can be customised according to the user’s role and the company’s preference. At Olympic, the sales reps only see sales records about their own customers with limited margin information.

Paul expressed that the most useful view for him and his finance director was the margin analysis.

He explained that, 'It’s such an easy tool as we can pin down any variances very quickly - to one transaction if needed. I’m frequently away from the office on business - particularly if I’m buying out in the Far East – and Vecta lets me see what’s happening in the business at any time without making loads of phone calls or sending emails.'

It’s enabled me to spend more time managing and directing my business rather than having to waste time chasing data.

Paul Gordon - Managing Director at Olympic Fixings