Company “Agro-Building Alliance ASTRA” — one of the largest suppliers and service operators of agricultural machinery in Ukraine, on the market for more than 20 years. “ASTRA” specializes in selling new and used agricultural machinery, warranty and post-warranty equipment servicing, as well as selling spare parts and components.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
“ASTRA” is one of the market leaders: the company’s range covers dozens of brands and hundreds of product names, and its customers include major landowners, farms, and agricultural companies nationwide. The company had no tool for centrally managing this volume of information — managers and executives used 1C, Excel and personal notes, which made strategic sales planning, as well as monitoring and analyzing the department’s work, difficult.
THE COMPANY NEEDED A TOOL THAT WOULD ALLOW IT TO:
- streamline the collection of farm data
- consolidate all information in a single information environment and ensure quick access to it;
- categorize and segment farms based on their potential;
- boost manager efficiency and consistency of action through a process-based approach;
- build a transparent, systematic approach to process management, in order to grow the share of agricultural machinery sales by 20%.
“ASTRA” ran a tender, which resulted in the Creatio platform being chosen as the tool for the project, and Sales’Up, a Terrasoft Ukraine partner, as the integrator. The decision was shaped by Creatio’s low-code tools, which let users maintain the system and make necessary changes themselves, as well as by the ability to scale the solution and automate various areas of work. In addition, “ASTRA” noted that the integrator’s industry expertise played an important role.
“We spent quite a long time carefully choosing a CRM system and an integrator: over six months we studied various offers and spoke directly with the market players who had already carried out similar projects in our industry. In the end, we concluded that Creatio has the most suitable functionality for us. We were also won over by the fact that the integrator Sales’Up spoke our “language” and offered the most fitting solution for our tasks.”
PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION
BUILDING A UNIFIED INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT AND MANAGING THE CUSTOMER BASE
As part of the project, integration with 1C was carried out, which made it possible to bring together, on a single platform, information on customers, orders, company products, price lists (including exchange rates), shipment and payment schedules, and accounts receivable. Regional representatives also enter information into the system, which they collect during visits.
This approach ensures data accuracy and quick access to it — for example, in the past, managers had to call the head office to get correct data. What’s more, consolidating data is convenient not only for storage but also for processing. Thanks to a scoring model, all counterparties are segmented based on which products and services interest them (specialty machinery, components, optional equipment, etc.).
AUTOMATING VISIT ACTIVITY
The Field Sales for Creatio product makes it possible to automate a regional representative’s visit — from assigning the staff member a task through to giving a presentation and recording the meeting’s outcome. For example, using the product, representatives check in and check out on-site, enter customer information, and put together commercial proposals. What’s more, they get instant access to all the information they need for the visit: scripts, presentations, product descriptions, and so on.
“Before rolling out the system, there was a concern the team would find it hard to adapt to the new working conditions. Now Creatio is used by all the sales department’s staff, and we see there are no difficulties with the work, managers got up to speed in the CRM system almost right away.”
IMPROVING PLANNING
Given its large product range and broad geographic presence, “ASTRA” needed the functionality to plan sales across various dimensions. This capability is now implemented on the Creatio platform: the company builds plans by region, brand, manager, customer, can build plans for first-time and repeat sales, and much more.
Managers can track plan progress right in the platform’s mobile version. The system lets you track actual sales, the current bonus-matrix accrual percentage, the sales volume needed to move up to the next level, and other indicators.
MONITORING AND ANALYZING THE SALES DEPARTMENT’S WORK
One of the company’s key requests at the project’s start was ensuring quick access to analytics, as well as setting up fast report generation. The system has standard reports configured, along with defined KPIs that are generated automatically thanks to the creation of a unified information environment. This has not only simplified monitoring every staff member’s department metrics and boosted self-motivation, but also sped up management decision-making.
MONITORING AND PLANNING DEMO TOURS
Because planning demo-tour expenses was labour-intensive and their effectiveness was hard to gauge, there was a need to automate this process. The Creatio platform now offers budget management, planning and expense tracking with relocation options, convenient route building, and customer selection for demonstrations with automatic calculation of all metrics. Automating this process made it clearer and more manageable, and made it possible to fully monitor its effectiveness for further optimization
SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT PLANS
Automating sales is only the first stage of the Creatio rollout project. Going forward, the company plans to automate the entire customer journey, from first contact and the first sale through to after-sales service and cross-selling, and to scale the system to other areas of its work.
Another process is now being prepared for launch — managing staff incentives. Calculating bonuses was very labour-intensive, taking up to a month, with 4-5 departments involved in the process itself. At the same time, staff didn’t know what bonus level they could expect partway through the season.
Thanks to the Planning tool, the company and its staff will be able to track sales-plan progress in real time and respond promptly to any changes. Information on plan progress and bonuses will be available to every staff member in the mobile app, whenever convenient.
Another stage of the project will be optimizing the service department, as part of which the process of handling customer requests will be automated, and the mobile app for service engineers will be adapted — with automatic labour-cost billing, materials write-off, preparation of all necessary documents (a commissioning certificate, an acceptance-transfer act, etc.), and a service-engineer workload schedule split by skill group.
“Companies in Ukraine’s agricultural sector are actively looking for ways to grow and expand their business — automation is unquestionably one such solution, as we can see in the example of “ASTRA.” We’re glad that our expertise in delivering projects for agricultural companies helps the customer do their internal work better and more easily, and conquer new heights in the market.”
