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Brandrud Furniture was established in 1955 by Harold Brandrud in
Seattle, Washington with a focus on high-quality, custom furniture. The company
has grown significantly since then, but its dedication to quality furniture and
service has remained the same.
Brandrud manufactures high-quality, functional, commercial
furniture for health care, higher education and educational institutions that
require a long sales cycle and some customization. The sales force consists of
independent sales representatives spread across the United States with sales
support located at the manufacturing facility in Auburn, Washington.
The Challenge
When Bobby Holt, Lee Falck and a group of investors purchased the
company in the year 2000, Brandrud’s growth had plateaued. In addition, the
competition from overseas vendors was increasing in their market. Holt and
Falck wanted to find a way to increase the company’s growth while still
maintaining their commitment to providing top-quality furniture.
The first task was to streamline the manufacturing process, reduce
lead times and introduce more cutting edge design concepts. With leads times
reduced by 66% and costs in-line, sales expansion and growth in their niche
market as well as market expansion became the order of the day.
Both Holt and Falck realized that putting a sales process in place
was critical to building a more efficient and effective sales organization.
Brandrud was managing sales opportunities with an outdated, custom Access
database that simply stored data and did not allow for a central access of
customer sales information or management of a sales process. They needed an
easy to use sales management software solution that would help them establish the sales process itself,
create benchmarks for sales opportunity management and provide much better
reporting and sales forecasting based on actual data in the sales pipeline.
“After we improved the manufacturing processes and back office
functions, we knew the next critical step for us to grow this business was to
address the sales side. “said Bobby Holt, President of Brandrud. “We were
growing despite a lagging economy, but knew that if we were more effective at
managing our sales process that we could predict future demand better while
increasing our sales even more.”
The Solution
After looking at sales management software including Prophet, ACT! and custom development,
Brandrud selected Prophet to help them with their sales organization on two
levels:
- Establish a sales process for the first time in company history.
- Provide an easy to use solution for tracking and managing sales opportunities
that can be implemented with a far flung group of independent representatives.
Prophet was selected over ACT! because of the true integration of
the sales opportunity manager into Outlook, the clean interface which makes the
product easy to use and the customization features.
In addition to the sales management software solution itself, Avidian Technologies
offered training sessions to help Brandrud think through and establish the
sales process as well as understand the more advanced features and sharing
capabilities of Prophet. The training also helped Brandrud expand its
knowledge of the features that Outlook already includes that will make managing
the process more efficient as well as how to sell more effectively.
Brandrud now has a sales process in place that allows them to
track opportunities through a long sales process. Contact notes, quote files,
opportunity details and the stage of the opportunity are now organized and
accessible through an interface that the sales team was already familiar with.
When a current or potential customer contacts Brandrud and asks
for a quote, the contact information is entered into Prophet by a sales
support or customer service employee. The contact is assigned to a sales rep to
generate a quote and a tickler task is created to re-contact the potential
customer at a specified period of time. Before Prophet, the back log of
quotes from leads that never materialized would go untouched because the sales
reps are onto the clients that proactively contacted them. By mining the leads
that never responded to the quotes, Brandrud is going after highly qualified
leads that never took the next step.
“For the first time, we have a sales process that allows us to set
benchmarks and create forecast reports that are consistent among sales reps,”
said Bobby Holt, President of Brandrud, Inc. “We were able to get up and
running quickly with the core functionality of Prophet and the training on
Outlook was extremely helpful to making our daily tasks easier.”
Before being purchased by Holt and Falck, Brandrud Furniture had
already established itself as a company committed to excellence. But under
Holt’s and Falck’s leadership, Brandrud’s sales have reached $15 million
annually from hospitals, clinics, doctors offices, universities, colleges and
custom production. With the help of Avidian Technologies’ Prophet Sales Management software, Holt
and Falck hope to add to the success Brandrud has already experienced.
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