Case Study: BECO Holding Company

Chief uses RIghtNow® to convert leads, boost installed base sales, ease workloads and launch new business.

Goals

	Increase revenue by reaching new customers
	Increase sales to existing customers
	Improve efficiency and consistency of outbound email communications
	Support new business offerings

Achievements

	More effective conversion of leads into active buyers
	35% increase in average order size
	Ad hoc emails replaced with structured campaigns
	Grant-writing seminar business taken from launch to $300,000 in revenue in six months

Some companies think they’re fully exploiting the potential value of the internet just because they’re selling products through their website. But others, like Chief Supply, know there is a lot more they can do to grow their online business.

In fact, by implementing RightNow, Chief has been able to gain new customers, increase sales to existing ones, relieve its sales staff of email tasks, and launch a new business that has generated more than $300,000 in high-margin revenue within its first six months.

“Email is an extremely effective medium for telling customers and prospects about new products and special offers,” declares Karen Brinson Yates, application coordinator at BHC. “By enabling us to better take advantage of this medium, RightNow has had a significant positive impact on our company’s top- and bottom-line performance.”

Tapping the full value of the database

One of the main factors that motivated Chief to implement RightNow was the database of customer contacts it had developed over the years through its eCommerce website. The database had reached 45,000 email addresses—but Chief had no convenient way to take advantage of it.

With RightNow, though, Chief’s marketers could use those email addresses to let potential customers know about its product line and special offers. The company could also track responses, so that it could see which messages were most effective for converting prospects into buyers.

Chief has focused on a newsletter format, which it uses to provide recipients with a variety of information every month. Its open rate for this mailing is about 23 percent, and through this medium it estimates it has added somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 customers.

With product specific content and direct links to the eCommerce site, newsletter mailings make Chief’s existing customers more aware of the company’s current offerings. This awareness has driven a 35 percent increase in the average size of customer orders.

Sending out a monthly newsletter has the added benefit of making life easier for sales reps and ensures that all prospects get a consistent, well-crafted message.

“In the past, sales reps would send emails to prospects and customers on an ad hoc basis, so we’d sometimes end up sending inconsistent information, and our Outlook mail server would get all clogged up with separate PDF attachments,” recalls Brinson Yates. “Now, we send out emails that are carefully worded and proofed for maximum impact—so our sales reps can concentrate on selling, instead of on composing emails.”

Successfully launching a new line of business through email

In addition to sending out its monthly newsletter, Chief has also used RightNow to successfully promote an entirely new line of business. This line of business provides seminars that teach managers of public safety agencies how to get grants to supplement their other funding sources. Such grants can be enormously helpful to Chief’s customers, since many of them are struggling with limited budgets and growing needs. The seminars are also helpful to Chief, because customers often use some portion of the grants to purchase additional equipment.

Within six months of launching its regional seminar business, Chief generated more than $300,000 in revenue from these seminars—and has seen many of its customers win grants they otherwise would not have received.

All promotions for this seminar series were done with RightNow.

“The grant-writing seminars represent an extremely valuable new service for our customers and a profitable new business for us,” says Brinson Yates. “And by promoting this business exclusively via RightNow, we’ve been able to capitalize on this opportunity to better serve our customers while controlling our costs.”

RightNow: A reliable and responsive partner

Brinson Yates says that Chief did not have to undertake an extensive, time-consuming evaluation of other solutions in order to feel comfortable with its decision to go with RightNow. “It was clear from the beginning that RightNow offered the functionality we needed,” she notes. “And there was enough third-party validation out there for us to make the buying decision with confidence.”

She also says Chief greatly preferred RightNow’s on demand model to either a conventional software purchase or a pay-as-you-go service. “We did not want to have to depend on a service provider every time we wanted to execute a campaign, and we didn’t want to take on the costs and management burdens of application ownership,” she explains. “RightNow offered us the best of both worlds—allowing us to avoid the hassle and expense of a software deployment, while giving us total control over how and when we do our mailings.”

Brinson Yates adds that RightNow has been a reliable and responsive partner, in addition to delivering a flexible, robust marketing application. “Because RightNow provided the training we needed, we have been able to do what we need to do without a lot of assistance from them,” she says. “But when we do have questions, RightNow is always right there with the answer.”