About the company
Since launching in the early ‘90s, this leading hardlines company has established itself as a global provider of power tools and outdoor power equipment, sold by more than 30,000 stores in 100 countries.
When they became a vendor at one of the nation’s top retailers specializing in home improvement, they crafted a new strategy - deploy a dedicated field team, enabled with new technology to allow them to focus, support, and bring the partnership to the next level. Within just one year, they earned the Vendor of the Year from this retailer.
Key Challenges
- Build a field team quickly to support 1,000’s of stores across North America
- Train, enable, and focus every field rep with the proper resources to educate, merchandise, and create brand champions within every single account.
- Provide real-time insights back to corporate and the retailer, on-shelf performance, new displays, product mix, sales, promotions etc.
Key Benefits
- Real-time visibility into key accounts, market insights, competitive activity
- A strong field team with a 95 percent retention rate
- Ease of access to POS data, from a national level down to an individual rep level - allowing leaders to calculate easily the impact their team was having on revenue
Challenge
For more than 20 years, this hardlines company has earned its reputation for continuous innovation and dedication to creating new and effective product solutions in the cordless power tool and outdoor power market. In 2019, the team recognized a need to develop a field team that could be present in hardware stores across the country in order to continue to support their key organizational goals through a field marketing team – brand advocacy, training education, and world-class merchandising.
They needed a retail execution platform that could track the performance of their SKUs as well as how the activities their field reps took affected them. They needed insight into what their field team was seeing in order to react to the markets and make adjustments to their merchandising at a corporate level. They also needed a system that could provide reports with field data back to their retailer on sales performance, product mixes, and how their stores appear.
“It's important that we have that visibility and insight from Repsly – utilizing the mobile app in the field so that we’re able to show that to our retailer whenever and wherever they need it, said Steve Holtz, program manager at a hard goods merchandising company. “We need a great deal of insight to show them what the partnership is yielding.”
Solution
Creating a one-stop-shop for insights across the nation
By working closely with the Repsly team, the company was able to develop dashboards that gave field-level insights into each store and field rep by leveraging POS data. Now, they have real-time visibility into the field from anywhere.
“Data is everything to us,” Holtz said. We believe in good data. If it’s measured, it gets managed. For us, data is how we steer our ship, so having POS data at our fingertips on the mobile phone or desktop makes all of our lives so much easier by being able to see exactly what our team is seeing in the field.”
Growing and developing the field team sales rapidly with ease
As the markets continue to respond well to their brands and field team presence, they’re poised to expand the field team as quickly as possible, and have been successful in onboarding reps and getting them out into the field in no time with Repsly.
“A large goal of mine is the continued growth in building out the field team,” Holtz said. “I think the biggest thing I can say about Repsly is how they’ve supported our growth and team. We’ve been in a period of hyper-growth and we don’t see that changing at all. We want to continue to grow the field team as fast as we can so we can keep dominating the cordless power tool and outdoor power market. With how easy it is to add reps in Repsly, all it takes is a few clicks and they’re off to the races.”
However, adding new field team members quickly isn’t all that Holtz desires for his team. Proper career development is a staple of their company culture and critical to their field team. Development, retention, and promotion are three foundations to success for Holtz’s team, and with Repsly, the team has all the tools to continue to meet those goals.
“A big benefit to us is the ability to create custom forms so that we can track different attributes of each rep,” Holtz said. “Whether they're strong in one area or maybe need some coaching in another, Repsly allows us to fully outline that person's career as they continue working here.”
Results
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Named Hardline Vendor of the Year
In Q4 of 2021, a major retailer specializing in home improvement announced their list of vendor partners of the year, and this company" was honored for excellence in product and service and was the sole recipient of the awards. Since the strategic cooperation between this company and their major retailer in 2020, their collective brands are sold within their stores globally. The company continues to innovate, bringing better products to their retailer’s global customers, showing outstanding strength, and making unique contributions in the Hardline business field.
“Whether it's the finance team, the field marketing team, the sales team, product development, everyone earned and deserves that recognition, Holtz said.
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Maintained above a 95 percent retention rate on the field team:
The field team responded extremely well to Repsly from its initial launch and has led to an overwhelmingly positive retention rate on the field team. “Repsly makes it extremely easy because of the way that we utilize Repsly it becomes everyone's daily task list,” Holtz said. “If they can walk into a store and know exactly what they're supposed to execute through Repsly, that makes them succeed and it makes us succeed.”
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Increased visibility on progression tracking from a managerial perspective:
With Repsly’s custom reporting and integrations, Holtz is positioned to understand how all of his territories and reps are progressing toward their goals in just a few clicks.
“Repsly gives management a lot of superpowers as well,” Holtz said. “Probably of which my favorite would have to be the ability to look at our progression to our goals almost instantaneously. Anywhere you've got an internet connection, you've got access to Repsly and any data or information about our field team, and that's so powerful.”
