DEMAND GENERATOR: Gary Foisy and Tim Hebert, Atrion
Security Lock Distributors, Westwood, Mass., was launched two decades ago as a family-owned locksmith. It evolved into a nationwide distributor of security products with nearly 100 employees, satellite locations in Nevada and Florida, and a customer list that includes ADT, Siemens and Securitas, the former Pinkerton company.
But the distributor's phone system did not grow with its business. It didn't allow managers to gather statistics to help evaluate the handling of calls. Even worse, calls were being dropped, backed up in the queue and sent to the wrong people.
"We'd have a customer call in with an invoice question and they might get transferred to our top technical guy," said Barry Silver, director of information technology for Security Lock.
Silver brought in a number of the "major players" to pitch the project, including Avaya, Nortel Networks, Siemens and two Cisco Systems partners, one of which was Atrion, based in nearby Warwick, R.I. The local solution provider distinguished itself out of the gate, he said.
"What separated Atrion from every other company was that they weren't just interested in selling us a system. They came in and wanted to learn our business first," Silver said. "They took two to three times as long with us as the others. They went way over and above the standard questions about how many users and locations we had."
Atrion CTO Tim Hebert said, "We spent hours, literally hours, just on questions--business questions, operational questions--just to understand how Security Lock operates [and] how they're looking to differentiate themselves in the future."
The lengthy discovery process is the result of a new approach to sales Atrion adopted in 2003 that focuses on team selling and account management rather than on just making sales numbers.
"With this new approach, we say, 'If you put technology aside, what would you have the conversation with the customer about?' " said Gary Foisy, executive partner at Atrion. "Based on those conversations, we then go back and apply technology solutions to the business needs."
"The challenge a lot of VARs like us face is to get away from selling an inventory list and not be so product-focused," Foisy said.
The approach has also put Atrion on track to increase revenue this year to $27.6 million, up from $17.5 million in 2004, Hebert said. And the satisfaction Security Lock's executives express is a direct result of how Atrion now interacts with customers, he said.
Security Lock was mainly trying to address its own customer satisfaction standing, Hebert said. The end result was the LAN and WAN and a new, robust call center with customer managerial interfaces. The solution provider also integrated products, such as wireless IP phones and client software, on PDAs into the system.
Calls are now being answered in less than 20 seconds and they're being routed to the right people, Silver said. What's more, the daily number of dropped calls shrank to zero from six to eight.
The new system also answered communications problems between the distributor's offices and its 20-person warehouse with a wireless networking infrastructure. And the call center's new managerial interface allowed the distributor to see into its sales unit in a new way, Silver said.
"Atrion helped us rebuild our business and do better business," he said. "Their solution resulted in a 20 percent increase in sales across the board."
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