Australasian ‘family’ takes on Texas

Australian-developed Legrand CRM is being wielded by a Kiwi executive to tackle the Texas education market…

A Kiwi executive at a Texas company buys an Australian customer relationship management (CRM) package — sound like Australasian nepotism at work? Not a bit of it, says Andrew Muollo, general manager of Mentoring Minds, an educational publisher based in Tyler, Texas.

Muollo, originally from New Zealand, helped fastgrowing Mentoring Minds choose Legrand CRM, a product developed, in 2002, by Sydney-based Legrand Software. Muollo says the Kiwi-Aussie connection is pure chance — his Texan employer opted for Legrand CRM totally on merit.

“I really think it was a non-issue, but, if anything, it would probably hinder me buying an Australian product,” says Muollo, of the perception of New Zealanders and Australians being joined at the hip.

In fact, Legrand Software has a Californian office and customers in almost two dozen countries.

Mentoring Minds became one when it went looking for a CRM product that integrated with its QuickBooks accounting software. It had been using QuickBooks not only for its finances, but for management of about 17,000 customer records as well. With a growing customer list — today the company has 140,000 — a purpose-built package was needed.

“The major issue we faced was that searching was a nightmare,” Muollo says. QuickBooks simply wasn’t fast enough to bring up a client record while a customer service representative was speaking to them on the phone.

Quick search needed
Mentoring Minds had three requirements of a CRM package: that it work with QuickBooks, that it be able to handle the expected growth in customer numbers, and that it be able to search those records quickly.

Its hunt soon led to Legrand CRM which, quite apart from being faster than QuickBooks, records every kind of customer interaction.

“It’s the fairly standard stuff that you’d expect from any CRM system, but Legrand CRM does it well and it ties in very well with QuickBooks, which is important to us,” Muollo says.

Mentoring Minds is also a seven-year-old business, which, despite the worldwide recession that has buffeted the United States in particular, has expanded rapidly in the past 12 months. That’s, in part, thanks to the US Government’s economic stimulus package, which has seen US$100 billion pumped into education.

Not every state benefited equally, but Texas, Mentoring Minds’ home market and accounting for about 70 percent of its sales, was one of the lucky ones.

Sales of its teaching resources have boomed and it has doubled its customer representative headcount from three to six, out of a total payroll of 53.

As the company has expanded, the sophistication of and reliance on Legrand CRM has also grown.

Initially, Muollo says, it was used for customer service, with some application to marketing.

Now, its role on the sales side of the business is becoming more important, to a great extent because of its ease of use. Sales staff who as teaching professionals had minimal exposure to computers, and others who were familiar with different CRM packages, all rate the new system.

“The people who have come from using other systems love Legrand CRM — they’re amazed at how easy it is to use.”

One new hire, within six weeks of being at the company, used the package to map out her quarterly sales schedule, Muollo says.

“She did a full report on her territory, listed what her top-selling districts were and, within those districts, the category A, B and C campuses. She was able to dig down and pull out all this information as the basis of her Q4 customer visit schedule.” Muollo says the sales representative was able to run the report on her own, after only a brief run through of the software’s key features.

“She can look at a school district, see who has purchased a certain product from us, make sure it is working for them, then she has an advocate for that product, and off she goes.”

Testimonials
The system also records customer testimonials, letting reps find endorsements of particular products, or customer service, by district, within seconds. Muollo showed the same rep the power of the software’s search filters, allowing her to quickly build a list of a handfulof customers who had sought her contact details from the company’s head office, but who had subsequently not been in touch.

“Those four names were her category A calls the next morning and she had quotes out to them in excess of US$10,000 that day.”

The software is as intuitive to use as a web browser, Muollo says, so even former school principals on the Mentoring Minds’ payroll, who were used to delegating computing tasks, had no trouble picking it up.

“It feels like Windows Explorer. I don’t know whether that’s a compliment to Legrand CRM, but it has that familiarity.”

His standard advice to users is, if they want to perform an action on a record in Legrand CRM, that a right mouse click is guaranteed to bring up a menu with the option they require.

The system’s virtues make it an easy sell to Mentoring Minds’ users, Muollo says.

“It’s one thing to say to people you’ve got to use this tool; the better approach, obviously, is to show them what benefits and time-savings it offers them and then they’ll be more on-board.”

Website Tie-in
The next stage in the company’s use of the software is to tie it in more closely with its website. The site takes online orders, and these are already recorded in Legrand CRM and QuickBooks. But it’s also a repository of free resources for educators, where they can keep up-to-date with changes in the sector, download professional development materials and see product demonstrations.

The challenge is to turn site visitors’ fossicking into leads for Mentoring Minds’ sales reps, by encouraging them to log on.

“When people log on, and we know what they’ve looked at, that information is going to be transmitted into Legrand CRM as well. We’ll see that customer X from campus Y logged on and watched a video about product ABC.”

Muollo says for a long time Mentoring Minds’ marketing and sales efforts had been going on in isolation of each other, but that’s changing. “Legrand CRM is going to play a central role in us integrating these two teams and building our market share in Texas and on a national level.”





> Legrand CRM
www.legrandcrm.com
US Sales: 1 888 361 0611
AU Sales: 1300 132 890
International: +61 2 8667 1500
info@legrandcrm.com




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