The E.B. Bradley Co. Accelerates Sales with Data-Based Insights
The E.B. Bradley Co. is a national leader in the interior building materials industry, providing distribution for more than 27,000 products from over 300 vendors worldwide. What started as a small business distributing cabinet drawer hardware has expanded to a massive operation over the past 90 years. In that time, the business has expanded and the industry and clientele have evolved. In order to keep up, E.B. Bradley has effectively leveraged technology to stay ahead of the curve and better understand the nature of their sales cycle.
As a distributor that services commercial and residential interior building design, some deals take years to come to fruition for E.B. Bradley. To complicate matters, they sell their services to both the fabricator in charge of a project as well as the architect or designer the end user has hired, since both may have a hand in deciding what materials to purchase. Some of the challenges they encounter with this business model include:
- Long Sales Cycle That is Difficult to Manage: Construction projects of any scale can take a long time from conception to completion, particularly those done on a commercial scale.
- Many Stakeholders in Bigger Deals: It is vital for E.B. Bradley to keep track of customer and designer communications, as well as inventory and vendor relationships in order to ensure a deal is progressing. With so many moving parts over an extended period of time, the sales cycle is difficult to keep track of.
- Hard to Know What is Working: Due to the nature of their business model, there is an entire sales division dedicated to encouraging designers and architects to use their products in projects with mutual and potential customers. With a large portion of their sales team never directly generating revenue, it is difficult to know where to best focus their resources.
- Lack of Visibility into Data: The long sales cycle and the numerous parties involved both contribute to a lack of centralized data to gain insight into pipeline and ROI. Without understanding where deals stand and what makes them close, it is impossible to make informed decisions.
The company was using spreadsheets to start tracking their larger deals and connecting the two sides of the business. But spreadsheets can only get you so far, and the company decided to modernize its sales platform with Spiro’s AI-powered platform. Since turning to Spiro, the company has been able to:
- Automatically Capture Communications: Spiro automatically captures and logs calls, emails, and text messages to prospects, clients, designers, and vendors in a single platform. This enables the team to effectively monitor active deals over time and ultimately learn what is most effective for their business models.
- Ensure Deals are Progressing: In addition to aiding their internal teams in effectively collaborating, Spiro’s AI Engine ensures outgoing communications and expected orders are not overlooked or missed by providing alerts and recommendations for users.
- One-Stop Platform: With all of its data going through Spiro, company leadership is able to better understand where ongoing deals are at as well as finally gain insight into which areas are driving the most revenue.
Jonathan Thompson, the company’s VP of sales, is a firm believer in using data to drive informed business decisions. He also says the key to their sales cycle is effective customer touches. Spiro’s AI Engine brings these pieces together to help the team get the visibility they need into every customer interaction from project conception to final construction.
“Spiro opened new doors to us, empowering our sales team and giving us the visibility and data we needed.” -Jonathan Thompson, VP of Sales at E.B. Bradley