Concordia Textiles and Efficy: CRM customer story

From a reactive to a proactive sales approach with Efficy CRM

Concordia Textiles is an industrial weaving mill founded in 1925 with nearly a century of expertise in the production and finishing of textiles. Concordia Textiles develops and produces textile solutions for a selection of professional markets. They manufacture synthetic fabrics in three areas: workwear, fashion and industrial applications.

Concordia Textiles has production facilities in Waregem (Belgium) and Suzhou (China), as well as in Spain, Germany and Bangladesh.

With the emergence of Asian competition, we had to move from a reactive sales approach to a proactive sales approach (...) in this context, we decided to purchase a customer relationship management solution.

Martine Verspeelt

Marketing & Project Manager

The market requires a cultural change

Concordia is a historical company. In the past, having a good product and relatively limited competition at that time made their traditional business operations possible.

“Previously, Concordia Textiles was making synthetic linings, which was a real boom business, where demand was greater than supply. So selling back then was quite easy, compared to today,” says Martine Verspeelt, project and marketing manager at Concordia Textiles.

“Due to the rise of Asian competition, we had to move from a reactive to a proactive sales approach. The challenges were multiple: listening more to customers, doing more R&D according to their needs… It was in this context that we decided to purchase a CRM solution. “

Change of practice

For Concordia Textiles, it was clear that a change was needed to remain relevant and competitive in the market. The choice of the right CRM solution was considered through a market survey, from which a selection was finally made and four companies were demonstrated. Efficy proved to be the right solution for Concordia.

The Concordia Textiles sales team consisted mainly of people who had been with the company for many years and had a lot of experience, but who had mainly saved this knowledge individually. The first step was to bring all this information together, create links and have a unified 360° view of these prospects, customers and partners. In addition, the change process was also a major challenge. The main question was how to get the relatively autonomous employees to share their work? A real cultural change in itself.

In order to provide as much guidance as possible, a training course was chosen for internal and external sales. With such a change, it soon became clear that one training session was not enough, so periodic training sessions were organized every month with an IT manager. Concordia Textiles now also offers training to new employees through an internal CRM trainer.

The competition is not outdone

Concordia Textiles currently uses Efficy CRM 11, the mobile application and Flexmail for marketing purposes. However, the competition is not standing still and the market is constantly evolving. Staying innovative and anticipating are the key words, there are still many opportunities for development in the field of customer relationship management.

“First of all, Efficy has a number of functionalities that we are not yet using optimally. We can certainly make more use of them. On the other hand, we still need a tool to capture competitive analysis within the CRM package,” concludes Verspeelt.

Results

Have easy access to all useful information through the mobile application
All customer information and data is centralized
Move from a reactive to a proactive sales approach

Other references

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