RLM Success Stories
Carpet & Tile Warehouse
“I had an 80-year-old grandmother look at me and say, ‘Why don’t you have a computer to make this?’” said Deby Winter from Carpet & Tile Warehouse in Vero Beach, FL. “It was perfectly clear to me that this lady was not impressed by handwritten quotes.”
To Deby, this brief customer comment was just one more reminder of the need to digitize everything.
“Using technology makes us look better to our customers – not only because we appear innovative, but also because using the right technology the right way enables us to almost instantly respond to customer questions,” Deby explained. “Google, Amazon, and everything else have created a consumer environment where people are accustomed to getting information and answers at the touch of a couple buttons. They don’t have time to wait for us to go find the answer in a filing cabinet somewhere.”
Deby went on to explain that technology does more than just improve the customer experience. “If you aren’t continually chasing your tail, looking for a specific file or scrap of paper that has the information you need, you’re significantly more efficient – freeing up time to focus on other customers and prospects.”
“We used to be like the Flintstones. Now, it’s like we’ve moved from prehistoric to the late 20th century. We still have too many things on paper, but we’re getting there,” Deby said.
“If we want to keep up with the great potential growth that’s in the marketplace, we’ll need to embrace technology, especially technology that’s specific to the flooring industry…and is also easy to use.”
“If we want to keep up with the great potential growth that’s in the marketplace, we’ll need to embrace technology, especially technology that’s specific to the flooring industry…and is also easy to use.”
Deby and the rest of the leadership at Carpet & Tile Warehouse avoided adopting some of the early flooring-specific solutions because they weren’t easy to use. Deby explained, “These early solutions were primitive and had learning curves that were too high for most people to climb. That’s one thing we loved about Broadlume Lead Management right away; it’s easy to learn how to use it.”
Broadlume Lead Management is the product Deby credits for really moving Carpet & Tile Warehouse into the technology age. (Technically, QuickBooks was first, but that was specific to only the accounting department.)
“The sample checkout function was the first thing that attracted us to RLM,” Deby shared. “We had a paper notebook for tracking samples, and when that notebook was full, we’d pull out the last few pages and staple them into a new notebook. It was better than nothing, but it didn’t really work. Tracking samples might seem like a small thing, but not tracking them – or tracking them poorly – can lead to lost boards, lost money, and more importantly, lost potential sales.”
Deby continued, “Then, once we got RLM, we quickly realized we could use it for so much more.”
In fact, that realization happened even before they started using RLM. “The same day we did the RLM demo, we almost lost a long-time customer,” Deby said. “She called me, upset, saying no one had gotten back to her on their current project. It took me forever to find the paperwork, only to learn that we were still waiting for her to get back to us with some answers. If we had RLM then, I could have looked up her project, immediately let her know what was going on, and collected the info we needed. And more importantly, she would have never felt neglected in the first place because RLM would’ve prompted the salesperson to get back with her long before she got frustrated and called me.”
The adoption of Broadlume Lead Management was the first step in the company’s efforts to become paperless. Deby explained their paperless initiative: “We want to get to the point where we never print anything. It will all be digital, easily accessible in RLM for anyone to find.”
Deby explained another key piece of their paperless initiative: “We’ve now got iPads for everyone so they can instantly input data into the lead, no matter where they are, instead of scribbling it on a Post-It Note and then forgetting to add the info into the system later… if they don’t lose the note before they get around to it.”
“We know that we’re underutilizing RLM, but even using just a small percentage of what it can do for us, we’ve moved so far ahead of where we were,” Deby continued. “We still have some people not fully using the tool, and a couple salespeople who still don’t grasp that the two daily RLM emails are pretty much their to-do list. However, we see more proof every day that when people are using RLM correctly, it makes us so much more efficient, and much better at servicing customers.”
Deby repeated what she continues to tell her team on the importance of everyone always using RLM: “Even if our team is putting 70% of their stuff into RLM, 30% of our customer and lead info is not where it needs to be, and we’re likely missing out on 30% of our potential sales.”
In addition to being a repository of easily accessible information and providing prompts to keep every lead moving smoothly through their system, the data RLM provides is also valuable to everyone at Carpet & Tile Warehouse. “Without RLM, you have no idea how much potential business you are missing out on, or how many times a project or potential project gets messed up – whether it’s because someone lost a piece of paper, or miswrote a phone number, or forget to get back to someone. With RLM, not only do you know these things, you get prompted to prevent most of these things from happening.”
Deby also shared her observation that the flooring industry, like many others, can be slow to change, largely because it’s easy for people to keep doing what they’ve always been doing. “I’ve often said that RLM is the solution you didn’t even know you needed until you see a demo and realize how inefficiently you have been doing everything. I didn’t even know what a CRM was or why we needed one. But I quickly realized that a Customer Relationship Management program like RLM does exactly what the name implies. It helps us build and maintain relationships with our customers and prospects, and therefore, make more sales.”