Vigon International: Building New Bridges with SugarCRM
SugarCRM customer Vigon International is a company with a long history in manufacturing and supplying flavors, fragrances, and cosmetic ingredients for companies around the world from their location in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. With a staggering growth since its establishment, the company can now pride itself as a family-owned business with nearly $100 million in sales.
But, although successful, Pierre Hellivan, Vice President, Key Account Development, struggled to achieve the customer experience level he aimed for. The ERP system they used only engaged once the order was placed.
With a small sales team, the struggle was accentuated as the automation element of the sales process completely missed. Due to this, complex customer meeting agendas were used internally but without the desired outcomes. The company then started to search for a collaborator to help them accelerate and automate sales to support the organization’s rapid growth. The solution? SugarCRM.
“We literally have a Ferrari of an ERP software system. Vigon has a robust culture of relying on technology to execute processes from the moment we receive a purchase order through order management and fulfillment. Our ERP software has the ability to conform to our processes. We have remarkable speed of execution, getting things done much faster than our competition, and with less human resources. Our headcount is surprisingly low considering our dollar sales – and we can do that because of the technology that is in our corporate DNA.”
— PIERRE-JEAN H.
Vice President, Key Account Development
The SugarCRM Solution
Starting from Management’s desire to automate customer interactions, from Sales to Marketing, we designed the dream machine, with automation in mind:
- Personalized ‘pick-and-click’ quotes from their price catalog
- Visibility into customer price histories on each item via tight integration with their ERP system – resulting in a thousand new quotes the very first month after launch
- Quotes move smoothly through an automated sales funnel, keeping real-time sales forecasts extremely accurate with minimal sales-staff updates
- Customer requests for samples are fully automated, and require no time from the sales staff
- Special price requests are automatically sent to managers for approval
- Quarterly client meetings – in which hundreds of products’ order history are reviewed one by one – have an automated meeting agenda created by the systems
- Follow-up requests during the meeting can be fully automated from the customer’s office
We started the onboarding process once the solution was mapped out, and Vigon agreed upon the features that would be integrated with our core systems.
One of the first features Vigon was interested in was the fast-click quoting process. Once implemented, the team at Vigon generated thousands of quotes just in the first month alone after rollout.
Sales Automation Made Easy
Remember the complex meeting agendas we mentioned in the opening? The team at Sugar worked on a way to almost eliminate the hours necessary before and after customer meetings with the help of automation. With a complex sales process, Vigon needed a way to automate sending samples, sending regulatory documents, updating the quote, and having special pricing approved.
With the help of the mapped process, now each salesperson can effortlessly handle the following:
- Create to-do tasks for Vigon employees and sync with Outlook calendar
- Enter comments for team alerts and reporting
- Routinely create and send revised quotes
- Automatically send an email to the samples department about requests, with account info
- Automatically send technical and regulatory specifications
After discussing with Vigon, we increased attention to creating a custom price approval workflow for management, allowing them to close more deals faster at a desirable price.
SugarCRM: Supporting Your Growing Business
Although most of the challenges faced by Vigon were overcome as a result of their collaboration with Sugar, there is still room for growth:
“We’re always looking ahead of the curve to see what’s next, what would be cool. We strongly feel that SugarCRM has been up to every task we assign them.”
— PIERRE-JEAN H.
Director of Natural Ingredients
If you’re curious to learn more about our processes and philosophy, read the full Vigon International Case Study here or contact us!
