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Prophet 2004, the Perfect First Sales Opportunity Management Solution – A Case Study

Brandrud Furniture was established in 1955 by Harold Brandrud in Seattle, Washington with a focus on high-quality, custom furniture. The company has grown significantly since then, but its dedication to quality furniture and service has remained the same.

Brandrud manufactures high-quality, functional, commercial furniture for health care, higher education and educational institutions that require a long sales cycle and some customization. The sales force consists of independent sales representatives spread across the United States with sales support located at the manufacturing facility in Auburn, Washington.

The Challenge

When Bobby Holt, Lee Falck and a group of investors purchased the company in the year 2000, Brandrud’s growth had plateaued. In addition, the competition from overseas vendors was increasing in their market. Holt and Falck wanted to find a way to increase the company’s growth while still maintaining their commitment to providing top-quality furniture.

The first task was to streamline the manufacturing process, reduce lead times and introduce more cutting edge design concepts. With leads times reduced by 66% and costs in-line, sales expansion and growth in their niche market as well as market expansion became the order of the day.

Both Holt and Falck realized that putting a sales process in place was critical to building a more efficient and effective sales organization. Brandrud was managing sales opportunities with an outdated, custom Access database that simply stored data and did not allow for a central access of customer sales information or management of a sales process. They needed an easy to use sales management software solution that would help them establish the sales process itself, create benchmarks for sales opportunity management and provide much better reporting and sales forecasting based on actual data in the sales pipeline.

“After we improved the manufacturing processes and back office functions, we knew the next critical step for us to grow this business was to address the sales side. “said Bobby Holt, President of Brandrud. “We were growing despite a lagging economy, but knew that if we were more effective at managing our sales process that we could predict future demand better while increasing our sales even more.”

The Solution

After looking at sales management software including Prophet 2004, ACT! and custom development, Brandrud selected Prophet to help them with their sales organization on two levels:

  1. Establish a sales process for the first time in company history.
  2. Provide an easy to use solution for tracking and managing sales opportunities that can be implemented with a far flung group of independent representatives.

Prophet was selected over ACT! because of the true integration of the sales opportunity manager into Outlook, the clean interface which makes the product easy to use and the customization features.

In addition to the sales management software solution itself, Avidian Technologies offered training sessions to help Brandrud think through and establish the sales process as well as understand the more advanced features and sharing capabilities of Prophet 2004. The training also helped Brandrud expand its knowledge of the features that Outlook already includes that will make managing the process more efficient as well as how to sell more effectively.

Brandrud now has a sales process in place that allows them to track opportunities through a long sales process. Contact notes, quote files, opportunity details and the stage of the opportunity are now organized and accessible through an interface that the sales team was already familiar with.

When a current or potential customer contacts Brandrud and asks for a quote, the contact information is entered into Prophet 2004 by a sales support or customer service employee. The contact is assigned to a sales rep to generate a quote and a tickler task is created to re-contact the potential customer at a specified period of time. Before Prophet 2004, the back log of quotes from leads that never materialized would go untouched because the sales reps are onto the clients that proactively contacted them. By mining the leads that never responded to the quotes, Brandrud is going after highly qualified leads that never took the next step.

“For the first time, we have a sales process that allows us to set benchmarks and create forecast reports that are consistent among sales reps,” said Bobby Holt, President of Brandrud, Inc. “We were able to get up and running quickly with the core functionality of Prophet and the training on Outlook was extremely helpful to making our daily tasks easier.”

Before being purchased by Holt and Falck, Brandrud Furniture had already established itself as a company committed to excellence. But under Holt’s and Falck’s leadership, Brandrud’s sales have reached $15 million annually from hospitals, clinics, doctors offices, universities, colleges and custom production. With the help of Avidian Technologies’ Prophet 2004 Sales Management software, Holt and Falck hope to add to the success Brandrud has already experienced.

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