Take a look around your office: chances are manufacturing professionals created most of the items you see. These professionals harbor a wide range of talents; they are artists, scientists, engineers, and craftsman. Yet, when faced with the challenge of managing their production time and the business side of things, many small- and mid-sized manufacturing companies admit that they could use a little help.
Insightly surveyed 465 manufacturing professionals worldwide through a third-party vendor to identify their top project management and sales challenges. One of those customers, Lorin Zavik, who oversees the sales and marketing department for Mid Atlantic Manufacturing, discusses how Insightly changed the way her team runs their business.
Insightly: In your own words, what does an ideal customer look like for Mid Atlantic Manufacturing?
Zavik: An ideal customer for us is one who comes to us with a concrete vision that we help them further ideate and create. We manufacture solid surface and laminate countertops. But as you can imagine, no two customers are the same. Being that we are located right outside of Washington D.C., we’ve had the chance to manufacture countertops for military bases, apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, restaurants, and corporate headquarters. The needs of a school differ greatly from that of a military base. But at the end of the day, we love working with such a variety of industries because it makes every day different.
Insightly: Wow! Impressive roster of clients. We imagine that some clients like to know what “the norm” is for their industry before they place an order. How do you keep track of all that variety?
Zavik: Honestly, that’s part of the reason we started using Insightly a year ago. Our business was expanding and we needed a platform to keep track of all of our work. Our CEO Laurent Claudel was also traveling more and networking with various potential customers and he needed a way to keep track of all those prospects while on the road. In the past, we kept track of all this information in paper files but Laurent is extremely environmentally aware. He wanted to go paperless and Insightly gave us a way to better track our current project and leads, while also helping us to reduce our carbon footprint.
Insightly: That’s great to hear you’re so environmentally aware and we are happy to hear Insightly helped your team go greener. How are you using Insightly on a day-to-day basis?
Zavik: We use Insightly to track opportunities on a daily basis. Once a customer requests a project, we enter the customer information into Insightly and use it to track the project from start to finish. We track our KPIs on a monthly basis; once a month, our team gathers to examine all of the current projects in Insightly, analyzing what we have won and what we have lost. Insightly allows us to set goals for the future and improve on existing processes. I also love that it is integrated with Google Apps so it can sync with my email and calendar for project management purposes.
Insightly: That’s great! What about hurdles and challenges? We saw in our survey that 62 percent of respondents cited organizing information as their top challenge. Is this something your team faces?
Zavik: We are a small business so being able to have one source of information is crucial for our team. But it’s more than that; Insightly’s mobile platform allows our team to work and stay connected from anywhere in the country, which is a challenge we previously had as a company. If a family issue comes up, I can work from home and I don’t have to come to the office and file my information for the team to see my project status. We also have an outside sales consultant who logs all of her meet-and-greets into Insightly from home. The ability to incorporate remote work capabilities into our office culture is definitely a cultural change, but an extremely positive one.
Insightly: Customer service is crucial in any industry, but I’m sure it’s especially important in the manufacturing space. Has Insightly helped in that aspect?
Zavik: Insightly is key to delivering the level of excellence we strive for when it comes to customer service. We are big on transparency, and Insightly’s reporting feature allows us to deliver a factual document that we can present to customers. It also allows the entire team to have a historical record of our customer. In other words, it is an educational gold mine of contact information for us. Not only that, the Insightly training webinars also offer some great insights and tips so I can expand my knowledge of customer service.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
