Quality Endodontic Distributors (QED) are an independent supplier of dental supplies, specialising in root canal equipment.
- 5 sales reps
- 400+ accounts per rep
- 30+ years in business
The Overview.
Established in 1989, the company was the first specialist wholesaler of endodontic products and now has nearly 30 years’ worth of experience in the field.
QED stock ‘the widest and best selection of products available from any company in this field,’ supplying to a wide range of customers including dental practices, hospitals and universities.
The highly credible sales team are consultants and trainers too. All members of the sales team have sound knowledge of endodontics, and as a result provide valuable information, support and advice to their customer base.
In an effort to offer the best customer support possible, QED also offers postgraduate dental courses as well.
The Challenge.
QED have five sales reps on the road every day of the week who each manage upwards of 400 accounts across the UK.
Like many companies selling a large number of products to many accounts across multiple sectors, QED faced some substantial challenges. One of the hardest was having to sift through the masses of data that is produced and having to check what is useful information against what is not.
Kerry Hardy, Sales Rep for the North West explained, ‘We were fed up of having to trawl through lots of data to find what we wanted. Instead we wanted to be able to find what we needed at the click of one button, we wanted to find out facts and figures on an area-wide basis.’
Kerry continued, ‘We were spending too much time analysing data and not enough time selling, we wanted to be able to scrutinise business in a simpler way. We knew we could be selling smarter.’
The Solution.
Before sales-i, the company was using a basic, clunky CRM, Kerry explains, ‘It was rubbish. It had an area to record a few notes in but it had no real search facility and you weren’t able to delve into a customer’s history or see a 360-view of the prospect or customer. It was hard to get to key information and there was no real depth to it.’
In September 2015, QED decided to give sales-i a try. After an initial demo, Sales and Marketing Director, Ed Conduit, decided that sales-i was the perfect fit for the company.
"I couldn't function without sales-i. It's helped me to work smarter. sales-i is my sales weapon and it should be the weapon of choice for sales people everywhere."
Kerry Hardy, Sales Red for North West
The Results.
QED has been using sales-i for over 5 years now, and Kerry states the amount of benefits have been staggering.
"It’s incredibly helpful for my organisational skills. MyCalls helps me to plan my next calls and visits without me needing to have a memory! I would need reams of paper, notebooks and alarm reminders without it, there’s no need with sales-i.
‘For me personally, it stops me getting stressed too as you know all the information you need is stored in the system in the cloud. Even if I were to lose my iPad all my data would still be in there if I logged in from a different device, unlike if I were to lose a diary. It’s a massive time saver too, it saves time interrogating data and seeing what and when people are buying."
QED use the various modules within the software, but Kerry explained the areas she uses the most are the MyCalls and Targets section.
"I love that I can see what was bought this time last year or what my sales targets are compared to last year. I was up on my sales target in January versus the previous year, which was great to see. It means I can always see at a glance where I’m up to at any point and know what I need to aim for the rest of the month."
QED also use the Campaigns side of sales-i.
"Campaigns is great when I’m not organically busy,’ Kerry said. “It allows me to figure out where, when and who to get in the car and go and see or email. For example, people who are buying product A but not the complementary product B."
"We’ve set up a campaign so that you can compare what people have spent in the last three months versus the same three months last year and we’ve been able to remove equipment from that so that we really are comparing apples with apples. We can take the one-off sales out of it, so we really get an un-skewed full picture.
So, if a customer has spent £3,500 this year, which is the same as last year but, as part of that, this year they’ve bought a motor too for £1,000, then we can see in terms of consumables that actually their spend is down and so we may want to contact them. We wouldn’t be able to see this without having a sales-i campaign set up to look at the sales in detail, as the customer’s spend would technically be the same."
Another benefit for Kerry and the QED team is the amount of pre-meeting prep sales-i helps with.
"Before a meeting I’ll sit in my car on the sales-i app on my iPhone or iPad and read my notes to see what we’ve spoke about previously to start my conversation off. Then I’ll look at what they’ve bought last year, any new products we are selling that they’re not buying that would benefit them and then I’ll check out a snapshot to look at other key data all at the press of one button. I could lose myself in all the data sometimes!"
The Future.
When asked for her views on what the next steps for sales-i within the business are, Kerry had a very clear answer. “There’s so much within sales-i we probably don’t even know exists let alone use on a daily basis, so there’s probably heaps more we could utilise. We might need to see a sales-i trainer and get some more advanced training’"
Kerry was also very clear on what, if anything, she would change within sales-i to make it better. "Nothing. Well actually, if we could have our own Paul Wright sat in our car on our sales visits that would be fantastic!"
Kerry sums up by saying, "I couldn’t function without sales-i. It’s helped me to work smarter. sales-i is my sales weapon and it should be the weapon of choice for sales people everywhere."
