"When 2,000 people are spread throughout the country and most of them are constantly on the road, the company management struggles to know which employee is doing what, where he is and what is he telling the customer."
Daniel Danailov, manager "Strategy and Business Development" and member of the Board of Directors
Every company CEO dreams of growing his business as much as possible. However, when rapid growth happens for quite a short period of time, the company management faces some new challenges. That's what happened with „Speedy" JSC, a leading Bulgarian provider of courier services. That made the top managers look for some software that can let them manage the sales process in real time. The company found out the best solution is Salesforce.com and the implementation was carried out by Next Consult.
The Challenge
„We created this company 17 years ago with desire to do the things the right way! Today we have more than 800,000 customers. Over 20% of the active population in the country use our services on a daily basis. Today we have more than 2,000 employees working for us and we have complete coverage of the entire country,“ Dipl. Eng. Valary Mektupchiyan, CEO of" Speedy“, explains. The company has more than 700 cargo vehicles. With them, it serves more than 12 million shipments per year, thanks to the complex logistic network that covers 100% of the country territory. Such a success story has its pitfalls. When 2,000 people are spread throughout the country and most of them are constantly on the road, the company management struggles to know which employee is doing what, where he is and what is he telling the customer. Just like an ancient empire, as the company grows, bigger and bigger part of all the activities inside remain "invisible" to the eyes of the leaders. Sales and activities data, as well as paperwork became overwhelming. Processing the information was getting harder and slower. Consolidation of all the print documents that used to come from all company divisions was slower and slower. All management decisions were based on sensing and experience rather than facts and figures. „During the last four years we managed to double our business, but this raised some other issues that we had to focus on," Daniel Danailov, manager "Strategy and Business Development" and member of the Board of Directors of "Speedy" AD, says. „The need to solve the problem with more effective sales management made us to look for a solution, an effective software solution, capable of optimizing and making our business more manageable because the scale that we have reached required a completely different approach for the management of this process“.
„The need to solve the problem with more effective sales management made us to look for a solution, an effective software solution, capable of optimizing and making our business more manageable because the scale that we have reached required a completely different approach for the management of this process“.
The Choice
The decision to introduce a system to provide "visibility" in real-time sales was the latest of a series of deployments of high-tech and advanced systems in the company, well known for its affinity to modern technologies ("Speedy" is the only logistics operator in the country that has all-electric cars in its fleet - 20 trucks with fully electric drive). The management team held a market research through series of meetings with companies providing this type of service. „The Board of Directors at Speedy JSC took an unanimous decision that the best system is Salesforce.com. This is a product that meets our needs and the ever-growing demands of our partners, clients and employees, "Juliana Petseva, director „International Relations“ at the company, explains. "Identifying the software solution itself is just the first step. Then there was the second step: it was important to find the right integrator – a company experienced enough to understand the business and all its needs, to make an easy and rapid deployment,“said Daniel Danailov. He believes Next Consult is a company that has an extensive experience in terms of management and implementation of software systems for managing various business processes. The process analysis and implementation ran very smoothly, Danailov says. To his surprise, all the sales reps welcomed the system and perceived it extremely positively. Sales managers startеd working with Salesforce.com immediately and quite enthusiastically.
"Identifying the software solution itself is just the first step. Then there was the second step: it was important to find the right integrator – a company experienced enough to understand the business and all its needs, to make an easy and rapid deployment“
The Result: Real-time Solutions and Forecasts
„One of the most important benefits of this platform is the ability to do sales on the spot," says Juliana Petseva. „Every one of our sales reps can sell at any time from his or her computer, smartphone or tablet – right at the client's place, dealing, negotiating”. Productivity of all trade specialists has increased due to the ability to handle real-time sales data. On the other side, all the managers now have the ability to „keep their hand on the pulse“ of the company, having detailed information for all sales immediately. The fact that all the input data enters a single system reduces the likelihood of errors - something quite common when working with multiple documents, spreadsheets or different software modules. What's more, they're able to analyze the data quickly. In-depth studying of trends and tracking dependencies gives the management new opportunities, as well as an ability to predict and take decisions dynamically depending on the current changes of the whole market environment.
"We would like to give a positive assessment to the consultants from Next Consult thanks to whom we managed to quickly implement the platform and start working with it. We see Next as a company that understands and optimization of business processes and IT systems so they can bind these "two worlds,"
Juliana Petseva, director „International Relations“
