When Jeff Ballow, sales manager of Highway Marketing, and Wes Pitzer, territory sales manager, needed an upgrade to their decades-old sales system, they turned to RepDonkey. With the option to custom-brand the software to any name, color palette, logo and more, they opted for the fitting name of Highway Patrol.
“RepDonkey [Highway Patrol] has affected our business in a massive way,” explains Ballow. “Being able to run reports with accurate data – being able to see sales month-to-month, by whatever manufacturer, whenever. It’s been fantastic to be able to track opportunities and the guys can just create quotes easily and quickly. It’s really centralized the business and helped us come kickin’ and screamin’ into the 2020s.”
RepDonkey isn’t a CRM – it’s a CRM overlay that sits on top of Zoho CRM. The manufacturer rep-specific quoting tool provides an up-to-the minute look at historical and future pipeline, open and closed opportunities, as well as detailed analytics and reports.
Time for a Change
Prior to Highway Patrol, the Highway Marketing team used Highrise, a now-defunct simple CRM database aggregator. Customers would text or phone in orders, followed by a multi-step process that included taking all order information, crafting an email to inside salespeople who would then create an opportunity and a PO for the customer. Highrise didn’t offer any reporting or opportunity tracking.
Now the entire Highway Marketing team utilizes Highway Patrol.
“Highway Patrol has allowed us to be really granular at how we look at our sales, our opportunities, and how we’re reaching out to customers,” says Pitzer, the internal champion for Highway Patrol. “Zoho, the backend CRM has a lot to do with that, but RepDonkey being the easier front-end for all of the information – has really allowed us to take a very detailed look at the overall business.”
No CRM Knowledge Needed
Pitzer did thorough research before making a final decision to use RepDonkey. Wanting something simple that the entire staff could easily use was top of mind. “I wanted to make sure that if we were moving away from something that worked for everyone, that it worked better. CRMs are complicated and we’d never used anything like this before – everything is tied together. We don’t even touch the CRM – we use Highway Patrol. RepDonkey does exactly what it’s made for – to not have to keep up with the CRM’s relational database.”
An Uptick in Quotes
RepDonkey provides an easy, quick way to bust to professional quotes on a PC or tablet in minutes. When asked if they’ve seen an uptick in quotes since implementing Highway Patrol, they couldn’t confirm, however Pitzer claims, “Quotes are much easier to create with Highway Patrol. It’s not that we’re necessarily generating more quotes, it’s that we know more about what’s going on with the quotes we’ve created.”
Customer and Manufacturer Portals
A dealer login was a bonus for the Highway team. In the past, Pitzer managed an HTML-based dealer log-in portal that lives on the website. Previously he had to manually go in and update customer and company information, price lists, discount programs and more. “I’d forget to update a price list, we’d use the wrong one and my butt would be on the line,” explains Pitzer. “The fact that all this information and documentation lives in one place requires zero maintenance now. If it’s accurate in Zoho, then it’s accurate across everything. We upload one thing in one place, and we’re done.”
Why RepDonkey?
The development team at RepDonkey loves a good challenge. “If we have a request for a feature – and it can be done – it will get done, and it will get done quickly,” says Pitzer. “We send the team a note and a lot of the time it’s like, ‘okay, give me until Wednesday.”
“At the end of the day, I couldn’t be happier we moved from our old system to RepDonkey. It’s exponentially better. We can pull so much information. Over the past two years, I’ve pulled countless reports that outline what each factory has done – how much is going in and how much is going out. I can go in and see exactly how many sales we had two years ago today.”
“At the end of the day,” says Pitzer, “I use the crap out of this tool. I really, really like it.”