ZEST Cloudsuite helps LV Logistics UK track all their sales related activities
LV Logistics UK have been working together with ZEST I/O to implement ZEST Cloudsuite for tracking their sales related activities.
The system is currently being used by their sales teams across the UK and LV Logistics UK have kindly shared their experience of working with ZEST I/O.
How were things before ZEST Cloudsuite?
Difficult, complex and unnecessarily hard. Quite often we had to log into one system, find a quote and log into another system. The big issue we were having with sales was that we were not able to track projects once they had changed names. We had no flexibility. Therefore, it became a task that we ended up not doing properly and we reverted to Excel, lengthy email conversations or bits of paper.
What were the pain points or challenges from the wider business perspective?
If you look at it from an owner’s or director’s level, the biggest issue was visibility. So, they couldn’t see what was going on. They couldn’t see what was leading into the sales funnel. So, therefore they didn’t have that trickle-down effect. They had no understanding of where the salespeople were or who they were dealing with.
In a business like ours, where there is a lot of cross pollination of leads, we might deal with someone from a pallet network, who might also be a customer for an overseas project. Directors and managers had no visibility of that from their level.
If you look at it from a drains up version, our sales people didn’t know if another sales person was working on that project opportunity, or another sales person already had spoken to someone at a company or met someone from the company at a networking event. And again, there was no visibility, intelligence or cross communication.
What happened next? What was the process?
We did a little bit of research on what we could utilise initially in the short term. So, we were thinking ‘do we get everybody to report in and have a sales meeting and share what they have got’. Again, to understand any crossover was difficult and complex with a business like ours, with 20 sales staff in the UK all working in different areas for different objectives with different offices for different projects.
We were looking for a solution that suited us. And that was the point where we started talking to ZEST I/O and invited them to have a conversation and discuss what they could offer us. Pretty much instantly, we realised ZEST Cloudsuite was the system that would capture everything we needed, house everything we knew to manage and market and give us what we need from both the directors’ point of view and from a sales point of view.
How has ZEST Cloudsuite helped you improve things?
We sort of live within the system now, pretty much everything we do in sales such as logging a note, sales call, email, follow up task, etc. is covered in the system. All our existing contacts and new contacts and their details are managed in the system. We work from the initial lead point of view to a project opportunity right to RFI (Request For Information) or an RFQ (Request For Quotation) with success or failure at the end – all in the system.
Having that drop down of how successful we are or how often we fail and the reasons of why we fail are all captured in the system. We previously have seen an opportunity that we’d declined ten times, we had no visibility of that. So, actually as a business, if we are turning away constant work because of something, we could invest in that or make a proposition to the board and say we are getting this regular opportunity to do work but we are not able to do it because individuals are not seeing the bigger picture. So, feeding that in has been brilliant.
If you were speaking to someone considering ZEST Cloudsuite, but maybe a little bit unsure, what would you say to them?
We would be honest and tell them why and how it worked for us. We don’t think that there is a glove that fits everybody but for us, ZEST I/O offered us a software solution to help us from inception to completion for everything that we needed. We didn’t have any gaps left in what we were looking for.
Our initial requirement was to make sure that we got an integrated software application to manage and track all our sales related activities. It is also great to know that ZEST Cloudsuite is scalable and has complementary add-on modules which we can activate down the road as and when we need them.
You can find out more about LV Logistics UK and their operations at: LV Logistics UK
If you’d like to find out you can streamline your business processes with ZEST Cloudsuite, please get in touch with our team. We will be delighted to discuss how we can enable and facilitate your digital transformation!
