ACT! Software the system of choice

When leading laboratory chemicals and apparatus supplier, Scientific & Chemical Supplies were looking for a CRM solution they found the equation of ACT! and DMC Software Solutions was the obvious answer.

Founded in 1957 to supply laboratory chemicals and apparatus into quality control laboratories in the metal and automotive industries, Scientific & Chemical Supplies is now one of the leading laboratory suppliers in the UK.

Today they supply laboratory chemicals, apparatus and instrumentation into almost every market sector including education, medical, petrochemical, food, aerospace, metal finishing, plastics, water, foundry, automotive, and many others.

Its a countrywide operation and extends into Southern Ireland. The sales force has a lot of ground to cover and plenty of customers to keep track of. So their choice of CRM solution had to be exactly right.

It wasn't on the cards

Gerald Bullivant of S&C took over the sales force only to discover he had inherited a card based system of customer tracking. There was even reliance on blunt edge technology like carbon paper copies. Apart from the overall grubbiness of the system as Gerald says, "it wasnt even getting the basic job done. Well no one wants to sit down and fill in cards so the job was always deferred. Which meant that in practice it rarely got done." Gerald had no illusions about the challenge that faced him. "Basically I had to drag the system into the 21 st Century" he says.

Gerald was familiar with ACT! In fact he'd trialled it at a previous company and had already recommended it. But his bosses had chosen another solution. Gerald believed he had been right to promote ACT! and was now prepared to put his ideas into action. I felt then and I am certain now, that ACT was the right solution for where we were then and where we wanted to be today.

Getting ACT together

With the decision taken to go with ACT, the next big step was who to approach for supply, installation and support. Gerald initially spoke to ACT themselves who gave him a shortlist of local recommended resellers. One of then was DMC. Gerald is quite candid about why he shortlisted DMC. "They are based close to my home, so I knew I could drop in on the way to and from work to discuss things - if and when they won my business." Naturally, Gerald was in practice a demanding potential client but he found that DMC met his requirements.

DMC delivered

Why did Mike and DMC win my business? Well for one thing they were cost flexible, continues Gerald. Plus Mike gave me straight advice, telling me what I needed to hear rather than what he thought I'd like to hear. Soon after the system was installed, Gerald realised that perhaps his own staff weren't really the ideal people to handle the hosting side. Again, DMC were happy to help and as well as arranging regular trips to see Geralds team and offer advice, DMC also agreed to physically handle the data hosting side at their own offices, so removing another burden from Gerald and his team.

A successful experiment

"The organisation of our data is now far, far better. Which was an absolute must", says Gerald. "My job is to make sure my reps are making the right calls to the right people at the right time. For this reason my Contact Management system has to constantly feed me up to date relevant info when its wanted. And can CRM save a customer? Certainly if we do lose a customer, explains Gerald, ACT can give us all the information we need to try and work out why and what to do to prevent it happening again."

So the last word? "Well here comes your quote" says Gerald cheerfully. "I've got eighteen people using this system. When they have a problem, they ring DMC who sort it out. I dont need to get involved at all. I like that."

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