Season 3 | Episode 8
Building a Successful CRM Strategy with Aadil Ahmed, EIS
Join SugarCRM and Aadil Ahmed for Fuel Growth Podcast’s S3E8 and find out what it takes to to build a successful CRM deployment strategy.
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About the Episode
As a Marketing Manager with a focus on CRM, Aadil Ahmed is dedicated to enhancing customer experiences and driving business growth through strategic CRM implementation, training, and process optimization at EIS.
On this episode of Fuel Growth, learn the keys to successfully deploying a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and driving user adoption. Discover how EIS integrates tools like Sugar Sell, Sugar Market, and Amazon Connect to optimize their sales and marketing operations.
Check out the site for more episodes, and information about the Fuel Growth podcast, brought to you by SugarCRM.
Guest
Aadil Ahmed EIS
As a Marketing Manager with a focus on CRM, Aadil is dedicated to enhancing customer experiences and driving business growth through strategic CRM implementation, training, and process optimization at EIS. With a proven track record of developing innovative solutions and solving complex problems, Aadil excels at creating and implementing CRM strategies that increase customer engagement and drive revenue growth. Aadil also manages the lead generation and conversion process, utilizing data-driven insights to identify opportunities for optimization and improvement. With experience in training employees on CRM usage and best practices, Aadil is committed to ensuring that the EIS team is equipped with the knowledge and tools needed to succeed.
Transcript
Clint Oram
Thanks for joining us today on the Fuel Growth Podcast.
Lizzy Overlund
What is the right growth equation for your company? Is it pipeline?
Clint Oram
Brand?
Lizzy Overlund
Product?
Clint Oram
Customers?
Lizzy Overlund
Employees?
Clint Oram
Join us as we interview CEOs, entrepreneurs and seasoned executives to explore what it takes to propel your business into growth. Today is a special serum spotlight edition of the podcast from the SugarCRM adoption roadshow workshop in the beautiful Amazon Web Services offices in San Francisco. Today, we will dig into the topic of successfully deploying a customer relationship management project and driving adoption and usage. My guest today is Aadil Ahmed, Senior Marketing Manager of EIS, Incorporated, based in Atlanta, Georgia. EIS is a leading solutions provider in the electrical, electronic and industrial sectors, specializing in materials, tooling and technical support. EIS serves industries such as electrical manufacturing, assembly and repairing with a focus on delivering innovative solutions, EIS combines its technical expertise and deep product knowledge to help customers optimize operations, improve efficiency and reduce costs. Their commitment to service excellence has made them a trusted partner for businesses across multiple industries. Welcome Aadil.
Aadil Ahmed
Thank you so much, Clint for having me. This has been so far, has been a great trip for me, first time in San Francisco, happy to be here with your team.
Clint Oram
Yeah, beautiful city, beautiful days. We're having great weather, though, I will always point out the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. I said that at our dinner last night, and the waiter tonight me said, you know, Mark Twain never said that. I think it's a great story that Mark Twain said that. So anyways, beautiful city here in San Francisco, thank you for joining us. Love to learn more about what's going on at EIS and what you're doing there. So first, let's kick off. Tell us a bit about yourself. What do you do at EIS and what brought you to the company?
Aadil Ahmed
Absolutely so at EIS, my role, as you mentioned, Senior Marketing Manager. I'm focused on CRM and marketing automation. So that's my role, in a nutshell. But my day to day is my main focus is automating and making the connection between the sales and marketing seamless. So in the process, I use products like CRM tools and other marketing tools on a daily basis. I also am responsible for creating any new processes within the CRM system and then deploying it and training our sales team.
Clint Oram
Is it fair to say this is a bit of a blended marketing operations and sales operations role?
Aadil Ahmed
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely, spot on. So I think it's very important to listen to sales feedback as well when we are deploying any kind of tool that requires their input. And I think that's where that's the key to learn from what the feedback is and what they want to see and how to give them that tool and make sure that they can they have all the bit like they have, all the ability to use that tool to its fullest capabilities.
Clint Oram
So, so in there you're a marketing manager, Senior Marketing Manager. Congrats on your recent promotion there, and in this role, I think it's a maybe a fair thing for me to guess that the sponsor of the CRM project within EIS is the marketing department. Is it? Is it the VP of marketing that's really sponsoring, or is it a combined initiative between sales and marketing together? How did that unfold at EIS?
Aadil Ahmed
That's a good question. So we have a new CCO in our company, and then that Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Commercial Officer, and he is the one, I think recently we have seen more growth around our CRM utilization. But one of the reasons is that he's taking it seriously. Yeah, so that trickles down, and I'll in, in a second, I'll actually describe few things, how I'm able to create dashboards and views that is specific to them, that way they can track everything and hold people responsible. And that trickles down to the CRM utilization percentage.
Clint Oram
So I might kind of take the thought in there that a key to success of a CRM project is that executive sponsorship, that leadership starts at the top, and if it's important to them, it's important to everybody else, right? And as your CEO paying attention to this project?
Aadil Ahmed
Yes, the CEO, Glenn Pennycook, he has also recently been involved in learning about, you know, different things that we're implementing along with SugarCRM like sales-i, so he's very aware of what's going on with sales-i, very interested in knowing, where can we take this in, when we when we can give him some real data, some real key insights, yeah, some real key insights on how we've helped both.
Clint Oram
Let's talk about that bit more. What are the marketing and sales tools that you have deployed there at EIS to drive the customer experience and growth for the company?
Aadil Ahmed
So at the moment, let me actually backtrack before I've been with the company for three years now, well, two and a half years ish, so before me, they've already implemented SugarCRM for about a year they, my company, have used SugarCRM without me. The problem there was they, nope. They didn't have a they didn't have somebody who owns the CRM process. So they had marketing managers, but nobody was focusing on just CRM, right? So that's why they brought me in.
Clint Oram
Another key to success, somebody's got to own it, somebody's got to have a certain name behind it.
Aadil Ahmed
And that's how I became part of the team. And from there, I started implementing, as I started learning this SugarCRM. Even though I've never used SugarCRM before, obviously, but I've used other CRM tools. Every tool is different. So when I started learning about SugarCRM and tying it back to listening to the sales reps, understanding what their needs are, and understanding what the leadership wants out of it. That's what helped me understand what tools to integrate with the CRM system. Then we went ahead and implement added Sugar Market to to the catalog. So sure we currently, we use Sugar Market, we use SugarLive, which is with Amazon Connect. We do not use Sugar Serve.
Clint Oram
Amazon Connect is the phone solution that comes from Amazon, right? Yes. So you've got your you've got your CRM, your marketing automation, your phone systems. They got it all integrated together,
Aadil Ahmed
absolutely, absolutely. So, and now the phone system is more so that's also interesting, because we tried, we twisted this a little bit, because now we're just using, we're using SugarLive as just a chat solution. Oh, okay,
Clint Oram
Amazon Connect is both chat and and telephony. So you're focusing on the chat, just the chat part first is that up on the website?
Aadil Ahmed
It is on the website, so that is fielding most of our new customers. So especially new customer, I would say, because anybody who needs a quick answer, if they go to our website and they need a quick answer, you know, they can use Amazon, the chat box, which is connected to Amazon, connect and get replies. Like we have set up some, you know, we have trained the Amazon Lex bot to answer some quick questions, making our E commerce team's life super easy where they don't have to, you know, reply to each and every question, which is, you know, sometimes repeat questions like, where's my invoice How can I find my invoice number? Where's the tracking number? All of that kind of questions can be set up. You know, automate. So as much as you can automate, better to automate things that can be automated absolutely and then outside of Sugar, we one of our main tool that I think that I use on a daily basis is a audience research tool which we use. It's called ZoomInfo. Shout out to them.
Clint Oram
A lot of sugar customers using ZoomInfo is, is certainly one of the leaders out there.
Aadil Ahmed
Yeah, and it's, it's, it works out for us really well because we are able, because we have so many different industries within EIS that we need. We cannot just focus on one audience. You know, we need different audience has different avatar for us. So this tool helps us. We pick our sales directors brains and sales reps brains to understand who are we trying to sell to, really? And then we go to this tool, and then try to create some audience that's close enough, and then we run ads to them with and we use, then we use Sugar Market to capture those campaigns. And then through the nurture, we retarget to those people who visited our website from these ads, and eventually that trickles down to the CRM system as a lead as well. And then, you know, hopefully they give us opportunity to add them to our funnel with some opportunities in the system. So it kind of tracks that we have UTM tracking all the way, so at the end of the day, when we turn the
Clint Oram
track where every interaction started from, that UTM track, absolutely, but what was the Google search that landed the person on your website, that started the chat discussion that started the interaction with your marketing and sales teams, exactly,
Aadil Ahmed
and that's the goal. That's the goal. Obviously, also, like we, we run ad campaigns in different platforms as well, so this actually helps us understand the ad budget that we're using for different platform, how
Clint Oram
that's important to your your your VP of marketing, right? That attribution and being able to understand where the dollars are having the impact. I'm sure that's one of the main reasons why that person was really sponsoring the project, right?
Aadil Ahmed
Exactly, exactly. So that helps us out a lot. So, yeah, that's just the whole thing. As connected it can be and as automated it can be, the more helpful it is for the Marketing team as a whole. So
Clint Oram
let me walk through this. We've got Sugar Sell, we've got Sugar Market, we've got sales-i coming. You're not finished, finished with the deployment yet. Then you have Amazon Connect, and you have ZoomInfo. Is that your full front office tech stack that you're working with? Or is there anything else in there? No, pretty much, pretty much, that's it. Are you? Are you integrated any back office systems to get information for your reps or, well,
Aadil Ahmed
yes, we, I mean, we have a SharePoint that's the platform that we use to, you know, internally discuss anything, or internally put out training videos, actually, or anything related to any of these tools that we just talked about. So most of them, I actually train the sales rep or anybody else who uses those tools. So what I do is, while I'm training them, we also record those sessions. And there's a whole other whole section called SugarCRM in our SharePoint, where people can go and then watch step by step videos so they're never lost. They're never when they're trying to do what they're supposed to do in the system while using CRM, they always have that support, even though I'm there whenever they want to reach out to me. So
Clint Oram
when the customer is asking about their order status or their invoice status, where does the where does the sales rep get that information from? Do they log into a different system, or is that integrated into Sugar?
Aadil Ahmed
So the ERP system? Yeah, SAP is our ERP system. Okay, yeah, and that is obviously integrated into SugarCRM as well. So for some things, pulling together
Clint Oram
the back office and the front office and surfacing that that key information our customers need
Aadil Ahmed
correct for some for some things that our sales reps still use SAP, because, again, SAP has been with the company since day one, right? So there's a lot of people who still want to do things the way they have been doing. So it's for a lot of people. It's easier for them to go get that information from SAP directly than going into Sugar. But that same information is available in Sugar as well. Most of the information that we have in SAP and an ongoing process for me and the rest of the marketing team is, how in sync can we get SAP and Sugar to be that's ongoing process
Clint Oram
right on. So tell me a bit about your sales team. I'm curious what type of sales process they add and what's the go to market around EIS? Are your sales reps primarily going out and hunting for new accounts, or are they primarily working with existing customers? Or is it a blended hybrid model?
Aadil Ahmed
That's a good question, because it is a blended hybrid model, I would say. But there's a ratio. Most of our customers are repeat customers. So most of the effort from our sales rep is to see their, you know, keep up with their needs. So every, for example, a sales rep can have anywhere between, you know, 30 to 40 accounts. That's kind of like average accounts that they have, plus they have other accounts that are new and, like, you know, transactional stuff, yeah, but those gonna be our, those gonna those are gonna be their main accounts that they need to keep. And what's their title?
Clint Oram
How do they refer to each other as account managers, account executives, sales reps, what's, what's their title? Account managers,
Aadil Ahmed
yeah. So we have, so we have, we call them Sams, so customer success managers as well. There are some outside sales, inside sales, and then we have sales manager on top of that, which reports to our VP of sales. So we have four different markets, main markets, so four different VPs of sales, and then below within them, we focusing on
Clint Oram
different industries or different product lines, different markets, different markets,
Aadil Ahmed
Okay, gotcha. And then we have a new team, which is new business development. So their focus is going to go grab them for the new logos, okay, even though I mean the other sales reps are also supposed to do that, sure. But like I said, their main focus is going to be their repeat customers. But the this new team of new business development has about three or four people in it. We have a manager on top as well that reports to one of the VPs, and their main job is how they can improve the relationship for new customers, and how can they get new logos. So in SugarCRM, I've created a separate module for prospect accounts where, that's where they live all day long, is the how can they nurture the prospect accounts into something real, and then those prospect accounts eventually turn into real accounts and go into SAP, they create then that's when they get created in SAP. When they are like, Okay, we're ready to create this in SAP, because we have some kind of opportunity going on with this prospect account. And then once it's created in SAP, then it circles back, and the cycle back to the accounts module in SugarCRM.
Clint Oram
You live in those details every day, don't you? Yeah, that's awesome. So So in there living the details for the last three years, I'm sure you've learned a lot, right? Yeah? And you know often you learn from your mistakes, you also learn from your successes. Tell me, give me like your top three biggest mistakes or biggest successes you've had while rolling out your CRM program, yeah.
Aadil Ahmed
So my top three biggest mistakes and wins, I would say. The way I would describe it is, I'll tell you three things that we fixed, and by fixing it, fixing those mistakes, it actually become, became like the win. So wins, yeah, there you go. So I used to think that spending more time in CRM is the key, but it's the from what I at least for my team, what I've realized is spending less time in CRM but more quality time. How fast? How can you automate things so my sales reps are not spending more time trying to figure out how to do it. Their job
Clint Oram
is to do bookkeeping and paperwork. Their job is to be talking to customers. Yeah, they
Aadil Ahmed
need to be out there with the customers more at the same time. How efficient and how effective can we make CRM while they spend 30 minutes or less every day? And it can be so
Clint Oram
you had, you had processes in in your in your Sugar system, but they were manual, and people were spending too much time, so you started automating them and giving them time back. That's correct? Yes,
Aadil Ahmed
absolutely. So that's one of the mistakes that a event. Initially, we were trying to track how much time they're spending, but then we switched to tracking the quality of it. I liked that point. So it's not about who the one that wins is not spending the most amount of time in Sarah, that's what we realized. Yeah, okay, great. What else the second point would be getting we never, we try to implement everything on the sales team level or the sales rep level, and we never really got our executives or the upper management involved in in CRM. So when I first started, no those, the executives didn't really have a dashboard to go see what's going on. So they would just rely on, okay, the sales reps are trained good, like they need to do,
Clint Oram
and takes screenshots, throws it in a PowerPoint, and that's the closest they are exactly
Aadil Ahmed
like in the internal qvrs, they would get some kind of feedback from the CRM system, but that's that was about it. But one of the mistakes that we fixed is getting the upper management involved, getting them, you know, correct licenses, to have create a specific dashboard for them. So now what we have is we have different tiers of dashboards. So we have executive dashboard where they see, you know, different kcis that we track for them, and we have sales directors dashboard that looks into their individual teams, what they are doing. And then we have sales rep dashboard, so that looks at as a sales rep, what are the things that are that I'm missing out on? What are the things which records, leads, opportunity, anything that needs my attention? So we've set some parameters where, if it shows up in this report, that means it needs your attention, and it's going to be right up on your dashboard. So you go and fix it, instead of going to search for, you know what? What do I need to do today? Right? They log in, they see something in those reports guide them through their day Exactly. That means it needs your attention. And then we have inside sales dashboard, so that's where the sales team support so that kind of having that structure has helped build up the CRM utilization, probably
Clint Oram
get new people effective more quickly when there's structure around it.
Aadil Ahmed
Yeah, absolutely they because they come into a very well structured environment, and they're not really trying to invent their own deals, you know? So, yeah, it's easy to train them that way, because we have, like I said, we really have this structure. So it's easy to train them and show them examples of what have we been doing so far and what has been working for us. All right? Tell us about your third mistake, slash success, and that will be not having an in house community around CRM. So what we used to do is we would onboard people and just train them, and then that's it, and let them ask me questions when they need to ask me questions, which some people didn't, some some people just didn't want to, they didn't want to ask questions. If they couldn't figure it out, they move on to the next thing and about their day, and then that, that task that they were supposed to do in CRM, it just never got done. So what, what I started doing is monthly we have this session called Sugar on the Rib. That's what we call it. It's a monthly meeting slash sounds like, yeah, there's like a
Clint Oram
cocktail, like a lemon drop,
Aadil Ahmed
that's and that's the idea. That's the key, because I want it to be like a relaxed session. Yeah, it's not a structure. I'm not showing your presentation. Sometimes I do if I have some new updates, but it's more about building a community where people can just feel free to come up. There once a month and ask any questions or give us ideas on, hey, this is how I think we can improve. And I've gotten so many good ideas from those sessions just talking to people who are actually the ones who are, you know, putting in the data, and that's where it all starts, the sales reps. So listening to them and listening to their ideas, and then understanding if it's possible or not, some ideas they give you and like, yeah, don't think it's, we cannot implement that, but sometimes you know it's, it's a perfect missing piece that you never thought you would need, and it helps us a lot. So having that community, and then in our town halls, we actually display the numbers we show everybody, it's like a leaderboard of who's doing what. So just having that internally, be very openly, talking about CRM and other tools around it, I think was one of the mistakes that we fixed, that we never talked about it that much. And now that we do have an internal community, and we have a separate folder within our SharePoint where people can go and sign up for the new events, CRM events within the company, actually, and any videos that has been training, videos that has been recorded, is going to be in there. They have open chat where they can chat with each other to talk about just CRM related stuff, and on top of that, I am available whenever they need any help.
Clint Oram
That's fantastic. Those are great lessons learned. First one was spend less time in the CRM, not more time. In other words, automate everything you can. Second one was pull the executives into the CRM system with dashboards so that they're getting a real time view of the numbers right there, okay? And then the third one was build a community around the CRM solution and the whole project, and get people sharing ideas and best practices and then hosting them up in your internal SharePoint like that. That's it's
Aadil Ahmed
a snowball effect. I've realized, you know, once you start there, it gets bigger and more people get gets involved, and it gets more interesting for everybody, and then it gets the overall results you can you can see it in the in the matrix. Love it a snowball
Clint Oram
effect. Well, hey, thank you for sharing your story and the EIS story with us today. Tell me, where can our listeners connect with you and maybe also learn more about EIS? Yeah. I mean,
Aadil Ahmed
eis.com is obviously eis-inc.com. Is the website that people can go in if they want to learn about our company, and they can reach out to me and from LinkedIn, a deal, Ahmed, A, A, D, I L, last name Ahmed, A, H, M, E, D, and and anywhere else. I mean, there I have Facebook or Instagram with the same name as well. So people can reach out to me anywhere social media, LinkedIn is a place where, if you have any questions, and I was telling you this earlier, I love to have conversations around marketing topics, CRM topics, automation, AI, so if anybody's listening, want to have any open ended conversation about any of those things they can reach out to me in LinkedIn. Okay,
Clint Oram
great. Well, there we are. We're going to wrap up today's CRM Spotlight Edition from the beautiful Amazon Web Services offices here in San Francisco. Even comes with a nice beeping in the background that people might have heard. But there we are. I love sharing that story with our audience and hearing what you've done a deal you've got a truly impressive solution for Your company. Best of success to you and EIS.
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Join SugarCRM and Aadil Ahmed for Fuel Growth Podcast’s S3E8 and find out what it takes to to build a successful CRM deployment strategy.
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