How to increase sales without expanding your team or spending time training sales managers

Published: 24 May 2023. The article was published on vc.ru. Reading time: 6 min. The goal of automating any process is to remove limits on business scaling. In the case of

For the CIS Association of Electrical Companies (RAEC), that limitation was the qualification of sales managers.

To handle complex orders, companies in the RAEC had to hire, train, retain, and at times overload managers with sharp memory and deep industry knowledge. In this article

Andrey Putin, Managing Partner at KT.Team, explains how automation made it possible to speed up the search for similar products by 17,000 times, from three working days to five seconds, regardless of the sales manager's qualifications.

RAEC, a major association of electrical equipment distributors, came to KT.Team with a similar problem. The client's portfolio includes about 30 suppliers and 2 million product names that are constantly updated and expanded.

No sales manager can remember all 2 million components accurately.

If for some reason the needed item was not in stock in the required configuration or quantity, even the most skilled and sharp-minded manager had to spend long hours finding alternatives.

They had to remember not only every possible alternative, but also check its price, availability in the company's warehouses, and turnover for that specific item.

Fine, light bulbs are indeed a fairly simple product.

But if the customer needed a residual current device with a fixed rated current and voltage, while the price and tripping current had an allowed range, the order had to be queued for the most qualified manager, who would not make mistakes in the technical details.

Solving the task stretched over several days.

Different distributors in the association could record the same component differently in their systems, with different attributes and names.

That is why an important step toward the MVP was standardizing the entire database of two million item names.

The KT.Team team programmed the new structure in the Pimcore PIM system and connected it via API to the company's database and the distributors' systems.

The next step is to create equivalence matching rules for each component subcategory together with the company's specialists.

The entire search system was built around these rules: as soon as products appear in the distributor's database, they are automatically loaded into Pimcore via API.

Next, the system automatically assigns components to categories and finds alternatives for them.

Three months later, we launched the MVP of the system for the Lighting category. For the other 13 component categories, RAEC employees could now configure the search logic themselves without IT specialists: while working together on the first category, we developed a practical framework for formulating rules that can be easily reused for the remaining categories.

The rules defined for the Lighting category and translated into the Pimcore directory became a model for other categories.

We provided the client with instructions for creating reference data on their own. Pimcore is convenient to use thanks to its many low-code features, which do not require developer assistance to implement.

KT.Team, together with RAEC specialists, built an intelligent system for instant searching of equivalents for electrical components.

Automating a critical business process made sales many times more efficient.

The new system finds alternatives for electrical components in 5 seconds.

Now the manager can advise customers in real time by phone, in messengers, or in person.

Workload is now distributed evenly across managers, regardless of experience or detailed knowledge of the assortment.

Tracking component turnover in warehouses and accounting for margin.

Now the manager can offer the customer an equivalent component that has been in storage for a long time, for example because it was produced under a less popular brand.

When selecting an equivalent product, the manager can now also take product margin into account.

The components and alternatives database updates automatically without technical support.

One of our client's requirements for the alternative-matching system was adaptability to change.

It was important that if item names were added or removed, for example when a new supplier appeared or an old one was dropped, the system would update automatically.

We accounted for this requirement, so any changes in a component's attributes are synchronized by the system in Pimcore, and database updates run every 8 hours.

The new alternative-matching system enabled RAEC member companies to improve customer service efficiency and stock turnover, balance manager workloads, and avoid reputational costs and customer churn.

Any manager, regardless of experience, can find an alternative for any item in 5 seconds instead of 3 days as before. The system MVP has been implemented for 1 of 13 categories.

The client added the remaining categories on their own, using the instructions and without involving IT contractors.

The development budget was reduced several times over.

The equivalent search system synchronizes with the component database, and equivalents are recalculated automatically every 8 hours.

Managers use up-to-date data to match products. The project was launched in 3 months.