Driving Growth: A Comprehensive Solution
The Problem:
An industry leading provider of industrial process fluids, our client historically serviced a fragmented marketplace comprised of nearly 50% small-to-mid sized business (SMB) customers with diverse and complicated needs. They had historically experimented with different, focused models yet none moved the needle on either the growth or the efficiency of the business. Furthermore, our client learned that a large portion of its sales team’s time was spent on low impact customer needs, pulling vital resources away from its strategic customer base.
The Solution:
Xenon arc configured a solution aimed at the specific requirements of our client’s defined market, leveraging the Xa-Direct solution, including the technology tools, technical resources and business processes needed to more effectively and efficiently reach the SMBs they were targeting.
The producer transitioned 200 customers, and 2000 orders/year to Xenon arc. Xenon arc created an aligned brand, a dedicated ERP/CRM system, and dedicated 7 commercial resources to support and grow the business through targeted growth campaigns with SMBs and in non-core markets, bringing their products and services directly to smaller, niche customers. Products, services, branding and messaging were now all 100% aligned with our client’s marketing and service strategies. In addition to the marketing and sales focus, Xenon arc focused on improving business processes and demand planning visibility.
Benefits:
This alignment, in addition to the improved business intelligence and market insights, dramatically increased customer base by nearly 3x in just 18 months. The supply chain and operational efficiencies led to gains measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Furthermore, our client achieved other gains including over 100% improvement in batch size optimization – which alone was more than enough to off-set the initial investment in year one.
The business team has grown to serving over 1000 accounts, processing over 3000 orders per year and has increased annual revenue by over 50% since inception. In turn, Xenon arc buys in exclusive TL quantities and has significantly reduced resource demand in Technical Support, Service, Manufacturing, Sales and Logistics – enabling the producer to refocus on strategic targets.
By bringing coherence to the channel, Xenon arc enabled our client to concentrate resources on its strategic market segments. Channel conflict with distributors over issues such as pricing, inventory and jurisdiction have been greatly reduced. And processes that needed to accommodate both large and small customers are being redirected to serve the market segments with the greatest impact – all possible because Xenon arc’s expertise in understanding and delivering SMB-focused solutions. Our client achieved out sized growth in what was an otherwise stagnant category, increased its focus on its core customers while achieving tangible cost savings.