+100
Sales reps
1.400
Visit reports / month
4
Countries

For over 60 years now, Smeg products have been known for their elegant and tasteful design, arising from the collaboration with architects of worldwide renown. Thanks to the business culture and philosophy within Smeg Group where the emphasis is on quality, technology, and design, Smeg is internationally renowned as a trend-setting representative of “Made in Italy”.

Since Gert Fluyt took over as general manager of Smeg Belgium, he has thoroughly modernized the way things are done at Smeg, bringing the winds of change throughout the company. We paid him a visit to learn more about this.

Gert Fluyt Smeg

The user-friendliness is exceptional. With a minimum of training, you can immediately make someone profitable with this system.”

Gert Fluyt, General Manager, Smeg Belgium

 

“When I started out at Smeg, there was very little transparency and a distinct lack of information available concerning the customers, the relationship with customers and their history. Information was by and large stored in our sellers’ heads, and could not be consulted anywhere. One of my first priorities was thus getting a tool up and running in which we’d be able to establish everything happening with customers, with products and with distribution, in order to then act on this. Knowledge is power: the more you know about your product, about the market and about the customers, the stronger you are, and the better armed you are to make the right decisions.”

“The more you know about a product, the market and customers, the stronger you are.”

“EASI made contact with me shortly after I started working at Smeg. Since I was seeking out a solution, I was of course interested. Looking back, SmartSales is the only solution I looked at. I didn’t contact anyone else because I was won over straight away. I immediately saw the user-friendliness, and moreover the solution works on iPad – and people like working with iPads. It felt right straight away! We could integrate our products into it, perform orders, give presentations, integrate our figures, enter visit reports, and all of that in a user-friendly way. I knew from experience how difficult it can be to defend a CRM package against a sales team. A great deal of administrative work is often involved, and I didn’t see all those negative points. That’s why I was with it straight away. The initial meetings were held in November, and by the end of January we were live with the solution!” says Gert Fluyt enthusiastically.

“The user-friendliness is exceptional. With a minimum of training, you can immediately make someone profitable with this system.”

“Since no real tool was used previously, there was concern this would mean more administrative work: let’s say the classic resistance against traditional CRM systems. I have to say we won the team over fairly quickly. There are always a few who need extra help, but in the end it went well. It’s important to give plenty of feedback with a tool such as this, since you can ask the sellers for a great deal of input and that means providing the usual comments is vital. That's crucial, because we have to see something is also being done effectively with all their input.

“The sellers ask me to give them the chance to put more information into the tool.”

“Thanks to the reporting I get from SmartSales, my sales reps are now shown their number of visits, the number of showroom sales, which customers are visited most, etc. That information is all displayed extremely transparently during our sales meetings. Sellers accepted this new way of working in no time, since they also see the added value of this for themselves. They even ask for new functionalities to be added for being able to put even more information into the system. They’re really won over by it.”

“Our customers are impressed with our modern way of working.”

“When our sellers visit a particular customer, they can't make any mistakes: they've automatically presented the right conditions and the right product range, they see what has been ordered in the past, etc. We have evolved from a rather traditional firm into a more modern business working with cool tools. This has had a hugely positive effect on our sales, and that gives our sellers a boost.

The best is yet to come

“SmartSales is currently still not linked to our SAP system. The intention is to complete the integration with SAP next year. What's more, there are also plans to start using SmartSales in our other entities. When I showed SmartSales to my international colleagues, they were keen immediately. Smeg Netherlands and Smeg Germany are now also starting with it, and there’s also a real possibility for other countries where Smeg is active”, Gert Fluyt concludes.

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