Company Snapshot
Star Asia, a business in the transportation and logistics sector, provides best-in-industry services that enable clients to optimize their supply chain and maximize their resources. The company’s service offerings include: ocean freight and air freight, customs brokerage, inland trucking & warehousing, cargo insurance, supply chain IT solutions, and supply chain consulting.
The Story
Star Asia’s top requirement when searching for a new CRM was the ability to grow quickly. One of their main challenges with their previous CRM was generating enough leads for the sales team to work. As a shipping company that resells container space on large freights from Asia, one of their primary prospecting sources is U.S. Customs data. Star Asia procures this data from Datamyne.
The methodology Star Asia previously used required a great deal of manual data extraction from Datamyne. The Datamyne tool allows users to search by various fields, but users have to filter the data, extracting the information they want, one by one. This made it challenging to get new sales reps up to speed and closing deals quickly.
Star Asia was introduced to SugarCRM through their partnership with logistics services provider OEC Group, another Sugar customer. To make the implementation process easier, Sugar built custom Datamyne functionality in the product and loaded two years’ worth of customs data into Star Asia’s Sugar application. Now, Star Asia can provide a new rep selling out of Kentucky with the top five shippers in that state. This allows new sales reps to get up and running swiftly and more efficiently establish relationships with new prospects, ultimately resulting in a faster sales cycle.
Sugar and Star Asia expanded the customs data functionality to also build customized displays. These overview dashboards eliminated the need for busy sales reps to flip back and forth between different data sources.
The Results
It took a few rounds of collaboration and feedback between Star Asia and Sugar to get the reporting of this data to display in a way that the sales reps could easily leverage it. But once we got it right, the sales reps were thrilled, knowing that they no longer had to engage in the long, manual process they used to obtain the data. Overall, the company also experienced high user adoption rates.
Senior management – particularly the VP of Sales – was extremely happy with the outcome. The new system allows them to quickly see where the biggest opportunities are, with or without a sales rep assigned. The new data allows them to quickly decide whether to put a new team member on an account or if it’s more appropriate for a senior sales rep.
In addition to the data on prospects and opportunities, very similar reports were created for Star Asia’s current clients. The ability to see how their clients were doing year-by-year and from which ports proved more meaningful to management than it did to the sales reps, who are more interested in looking forward than looking back.
The new data within Star Asia’s Sugar implementation is also now guiding their hiring process, based on some of the most active business areas.
The relationship between Star Asia and Sugar was extremely collaborative. By having weekly meetings – many of them face-to-face in the Atlanta area – the Sugar team was able to provide lots of revisions, along with the opportunity Star Asia to see the system early-on and provide feedback. This very open dialogue greatly contributed to the success of the project, allowing the team at Sugar to efficiently guide Star Asia, serving as true consultants toward accomplishing their business goals.
