Generator parts distributor closes cost-to-serve gap with Gearflow Sales Hub Pro.
For decades, the problems were invisibly piling up all around the parts and service team, cloaked in the disguises of comfort and familiarity.
It took an outsider’s perspective to point them out.
Gillian Roberts spent 25 years in the automotive industry before she came to lead the parts and service operations at Bay City Electric Works, a Kohler generator distributor based outside of San Diego, in 2022.
Her experience there helped her uncover the problems hidden in plain view, which were eye-opening:
And perhaps most concerning: It was taking the parts team on average 3-5 business days to quote their customers.
“You could not really help the customer on the spot,” Roberts says. “The customer had to help you help them, which is definitely not an ideal customer service transaction.”
Almost every interaction with customers was manual: Calls, emails, spreadsheets … even notes scratched on Post-its.
Roberts knew it shouldn’t have to be this hard.
“A lot of people that have worked here – wonderful, lovely people – have never worked anywhere else,” she says. “This is all they know. They're just trying to make do with what they have, not even honestly understanding that there are other ways and things out there to make life easier and their work more streamlined.”
So Roberts set out to show them a better way.
As a Kohler generator distributor, Bay City Electric Works, founded in 1932, serves California, Nevada, and Hawaii out of their three branches, and are in the midst of acquiring Power Systems West, which will broaden their territory to include eight additional states in the West.
Beyond selling and renting generators, Bay City also services them for end users and sells parts directly to wholesalers, averaging 70 wholesale customers a month they are fielding requests from.
The wholesale side of their business, where margins are traditionally low, is where Roberts focused her attention first.
Gillian Roberts, director of parts & service operations for Bay City Electric Works, saw an opportunity to streamline the workflows in their wholesale parts sales department -- and increase their quote-to-close ratio. // Source: Bay City Electric Works website
Her team includes two wholesale reps, based at headquarters in Poway, California, who not only quote all customers requests – up to $750K in quotes each month – but also handle all ordering, shipping, and receiving of parts for them as well.
Caught in an endless loop of trying to track down all the info to answer customer requests while managing the entire process, the parts sales reps were overwhelmed.
Technically, there wasn’t enough revenue to warrant hiring a third person to help with the workload, but Roberts saw where this was headed.
“There was no way for two people to continue going down this path and be successful,” Roberts says.
Irritated with how long it took to get information back, customers’ patience was also growing thin.
“I had to take over accounts myself because customers were so upset,” Roberts says. “But that can only go on for so long.”
Roberts knew from her time in the auto industry that robust customer relationship and order management software existed – but that they generally were overly complicated for their needs and often came at a price.
As she began to seek out a solution that could work for her team, a colleague in Bay City’s rental division told her about Gearflow, which a peer company had been using to source parts.
When she went to Gearflow’s website, she learned about Parts Hub Pro, which automates the parts ordering process for fleet teams and their vendors, and saw potential.
Could this work to manage orders on the vendor side as well?
After a call to discover more, Roberts found out that Gearflow was in the process of building their vendor-side software, Sales Hub Pro, and she committed to participate in a pilot in June 2023.
She outlined three main goals she wanted to achieve with this solution:
Regarding that last goal, while email can at least keep some record of note regarding a request or transaction, Roberts says where it falls down is that it cannot provide teams with a workflow.
She says it’s not uncommon for a single customer to simultaneously seek quotes for up to 10 different projects with multiple email threads for each one. This makes it difficult to keep track of where everything stands, particularly if a rep responds to more than one request in the same email.
“I really needed there to be a workflow that showed when I've requested a quote, I've quoted, I'm pending approval, I'm approved, I've ordered it, I've shipped it, and I've received it,” she says, ticking off the stages of an order’s lifecycle.
The wholesale parts team started their pilot with three dealer customers, who then could submit requests directly to Bay City through a simple, free Gearflow form.
Those requests would come into Bay City’s Sales Hub Pro account, where their inventory was uploaded. They could easily create quotes by confirming price and availability, and immediately send them back to the customer for approval.
With Sales Hub Pro, Bay City could also:
But then Roberts and Gearflow worked together to take quoting to the next level.
“I wanted a customer to be able to order a part or get a quote on a part even if I don't have it, because I know how much it is,” she says.
So they added Kohler’s entire inventory on top of their own, setting customers up for the magic to truly happen.
When a customer sends a request with a part number that is in Bay City’s catalog in Sales Hub Pro, a quote is automatically created.
What used to take days or even up to a week, now happens in seconds.
And no human interaction is needed whatsoever.
“The dealers that are using that now are just like, ‘Oh, this is so much better than what we were getting,’” Roberts says. “And I don't even know they're being quoted. It's all happening in the background.”
When the dealers who are using the autoquote feature get their quotes faster, they’re able to turn around and send their end-user customers their quotes faster as well, Roberts says. Since the generator industry is dealing with emergency power, time is of the essence and every minute counts.
This frees up the Bay City parts team to turn their attention to customers who do not know their parts numbers and require more hands-on assistance, including their top wholesale customer, which is a national telecom and energy operations and maintenance provider.
Even though they can’t often take advantage of autoquote, that customer is still getting quotes back much faster than in the past, averaging an hour since they started using Gearflow.
To Roberts, this is a major win.
“They've just given rave reviews,” she says. “They love Gearflow – they love all the accountability, because that means it’s us being more accountable to them. And they really love that.”
Following their pilot, Bay City rolled out using Gearflow Sales Hub Pro to serve all their wholesale parts customers.
From when they started with Gearflow a year ago, Roberts says the parts team’s results are a night and day difference.
“We went from using it with one customer to over 100 customers today,” she says.
Looking back at their goals set at the beginning of this journey, Roberts says they’ve achieved every one of them.
In the first six months of this year, Bay City’s average time to quote was about 30 minutes – down from 3 to 5 business days, for a 98% reduction.
Plus, their autoquotes are converting about 3x the rates of their regular quotes.
“We're having a huge conversion rate with autoquotes,” Roberts says. “Last month was over 80%.”
That is helping lift their overall conversion rate, which normally sits between 25-30% she says, to about 38% in June 2024 – a 52% increase in conversion rate.
And though they send autoquotes only about 15% of the time, those autoquotes have brought in more than 25% of their revenue year to date.
“I will say our margins are definitely improving, and we're making more money on that dollar than we were making before,” Roberts says.
Gone are the days of manually searching for the last thing that happened with a customer’s request or transaction, Roberts says.
“In Gearflow, we can message directly within the quote,” she says. “So all communications that are happening are happening within the quote it belongs to.”
Plus, any member of the team can access any customer’s messages and transactional info right in the Sales Hub Pro platform.
“Now, it doesn't matter who owns it, because we all have it,” Roberts says. “It's all there in a dashboard that we can easily see.”
The time saved from scrolling through orders in their ERP system or digging through threads of emails has allowed them to give better customer service in all aspects, Roberts adds.
“We went from being unable to answer the phone 30% at any time to less than 10% of the time now,” she says.
“Our team relished getting out of their email inboxes,” Roberts says. “That was a big one for me.”
Now if someone is sick or on vacation, their responses to customers don’t come to a screeching halt.
“It doesn't matter where the person left off, because we don't need access to email,” she says. “Everything that we need to do is right in Gearflow, and the customer doesn't need to know that there was a stoppage in getting them taken care of.”
What excites Roberts is that the insights gleaned from Sales Hub Pro are only just beginning.
In the past, she was completely in the dark over lost sales.
“I didn't know who I was losing sales to, why I was losing them, and what parts were on those quotes – I had no visibility,” she says. “So I could never stock those parts because I didn't even know what they were.”
However, with the data from the platform, she can now see what’s being quoted, what’s being ordered, which parts numbers are not selling, and what Bay City didn’t have in inventory. She plans to use those insights to make more informed inventory decisions in the future.
“I can see if we didn't have a part in stock and someone asked for it five times, which means we didn't sell it, well now I'm going to stock that part,” Roberts says.
She’s also looking forward to expanding Gearflow’s use to additional customers, as well as new internal users, as Bay City Electric Works continues to grow.
The benefits Bay City has seen are something she believes other parts distributors, dealers, and vendors could experience as well.
“We all have the same frustrations, right?” Roberts says. “Speed to quote, visibility to our orders, what quotes do I still have hanging out there, what orders have I placed, when are my parts coming in, how can I update my customer, how can I plan better. Gearflow Sales Hub Pro allows them to have a full visibility of their entire lifecycle of their quote from the moment they place that quote to the time it reaches their customer’s door.”
Roberts says the platform is filling a major need for parts sales desks.
“Everyone's doing it manually – somehow, some way, they’re keeping track of sales in a way that's just not efficient, whether it's in a spreadsheet or whatever the case may be,” she says. “They cannot just log into one portal and find what they’re looking for across their customers and communications, outside of Gearflow.”
The platform has changed the way Bay City’s parts team works, as well as removed the looming burden of burnout.
“It has helped us tremendously – our wholesale parts reps have had just a giant weight lifted off their shoulders,” Roberts says. “They are a lot less stressful, and they feel like they are more empowered with their data than they've ever been before.”
To her team, and to the emergency power needs they serve, Roberts’ ability to see opportunity for improvement and her drive to push forward has been transformational.
“They're extremely happy with the tool,” she says. “And our customers are receiving far better service than they were a year ago.”
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