How Aligning Strategy and Customer Needs Helped Backcountry Experience Record Sales Growth
Backcountry is an online specialty retailer and parent company of four business units that specialize in gear for wilderness adventures and outdoor sports, including biking, skiing, snowboarding, climbing, fly-fishing, hiking, and camping. As a large, global distributor of B2C goods focused on making the lives of outdoor enthusiasts easier, it’s no surprise that the company has experienced exponential growth on several fronts—especially within its sales organization.
Positive results have allowed Backcountry to keep up with its increasing customer interest. But with such rapid expansion, Backcountry needed a CRM partner that would help them grow and scale as a business while helping to personalize and automate their sales communications and processes.
Why Backcountry Gave Manual Processes the (Hiking) Boot
Like many companies, Backcountry staff logged and carried out manual tasks. Even though their teams did what they needed to do—sell merchandise, set up sales calls, respond to customer inquiries, provide customer service, etc.—at the end of the day, they started to notice that their tasks lacked goals, context, and, most importantly, customer insight.
Backcountry sells differently today because of the progressive profiling they can conduct within the Sugar Platform, which gives their sales team more insight into customers and sales opportunities.
“We have a customer-centric view of our jobs instead of a task-oriented view.”—Peter Tew, Senior Product Manager, Backcountry
A breakthrough for the company came when they decided to start individualizing their customers via an I-framed widget in Sugar called “Outdoor Passions.” This new addition to their CRM lists each customer’s hobbies, sports preferences, clothing, shoe sizes, and even the last adventure they went on to help each rep personalize their touchpoints. Because of that addition, sales teams no longer had to open a separate database every time they needed to access consumer information—it displayed exactly what they needed all within Sugar when sales pulled up customer profiles.
How Choosing the Right CRM Partner Allowed Backcountry to Prioritize Customer Needs
While customers are a huge key to any business’s success, there are other levers companies can pull to create meaningful and lasting results when it comes to growing their business. Choosing the right partners and vendors can also have a huge impact on the success and growth of your business.
Choosing a CRM—whether you are moving from an old one or implementing one for the first time—is no easy feat. When Backcountry knew they needed a CRM platform, they sought after a partner, not just a vendor. They chose Sugar because they wanted a commitment to an ongoing, strategic relationship well after the dotted line was signed.
“I really liked that the Sugar rep listened and proposed a solution without trying to do a lot of upsells; it was a natural process. It took two weeks to get all the stuff signed, purchased, and developed. Of all the third parties of Sugar’s size or bigger that I’ve worked with, this was the smoothest experience I have ever had, and the relationship has only gotten better and better.” —Peter Tew, Senior Product Manager, Backcountry
To ensure a long-lasting relationship committed to moving the needle on business outcomes, you need to choose a partner whose goals and plans align with yours. From there, both companies can work together to find new and innovative ways to meet changing customer expectations and needs.
How Backcountry and SugarCRM Aligned on Shifting Customer Needs
By working together, SugarCRM and Backcountry were able to take a microscope to sales plans and shift selling strategies to ensure that Backcountry was able to create more value and customization around each and every customer.
Traditionally, when organizations view customer experience, they think of it as the responsibility of the customer service or customer success department. But as we start to move into a new era of selling norms, forward-thinking companies are recognizing these changes early on and adapting their Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies in response to the recent shift in customer attitude generated by technology and vendor options.
That’s where providing your salesforce with the right tools, solutions, and resources can be a make-it or break-it thing for sales organizations. The right customer experience software can be the key differentiator you need to give your customers what they want while at the same time attending to your own business goals and needs.
Software that provides a 360-degree view of customers and their buying journeys helps your representatives understand what’s relevant in the eyes of the customer. Intelligent tools allow them to sell more, provide better service, and market to target audiences in a more productive way. SugarCRM offers robust sales tools without the complexity. Our platform does the work for you to create the most tailored, high-definition customer experiences (HD-CX) possible.
What to learn more on how Backcountry was able to grow and scale customer experience with their CRM? Download the full case study here.
