Sooner or later, any production company gets to the point when using spreadsheets for sales and client management becomes insufficient. There are too many leads and they get lost, team members keep missing deadlines, and the assignees fail to complete tasks. Implementing a CRM for a manufacturing company helps to automate production processes and optimize collaboration.

About the Client

SheSaidYes is the designer, manufacturer and merchant of wedding dresses and apparel for brides from the USA, Canada, France, Australia, Russia, Japan and 30 other countries. Although they have a couple of offline stores, SheSaidYes is mostly presented on the global online marketplace Etsy.

With the introduction of CRM, they were able to automate the entire business and streamline processes.

Challenge

From the very beginning, the SheSaidYes team relied solely on Excel to manage their operations. They manually entered information about customers and sales to the scattered spreadsheets. Sadly, using Excel, the employees could occasionally lose orders. The company’s processes were poorly organized.

For example, a salesperson often forgot to ask for client feedback or couldn’t keep track of measurements. As they expanded, the team realized that they cannot move forward without a business management solution.

Solution

As a rule, CRM solutions are used for effective sales management — from the first contact with the prospect to the paid purchase. However, SheSaidYes is utilizing Flowlu from the moment of purchase until the customers receive their orders.

SheSaidYes have divided all processes into two main stages — preparation and production. The preparatory stage includes cross-selling, getting measurements and collecting other necessary information. And the production stage is sewing the apparel and all the accompanying activities.

How Flowlu Helps

Let’s break down their Flowlu workflows.

Step 1. Preparation

When a customer buys SheSaidYes garments, they add them to the Customers record list. They assign an identification number along with the date of purchase, product name, price, etc. With this id, the order is listed in the opportunities and projects.

Each opportunity corresponds to an order. When the tailor receives the order, they see all the information and measurements from this number. The salesperson can quickly find and track the status of the order by the id as well.

SheSaidYes have a long sales cycle: there are about eight steps between when the bride made her purchase and when the team has finally created the dress. Such a process is determined by the peculiarities of the wedding dress’s production.

For example, a bride usually buys a dress in January for a wedding that won’t take place until July. The team needs to start sewing, but they won’t do that because the measurements may change over the next six months.

It always takes at least 5-6 months from the time of purchase to the actual wedding. During that time, the SheSaidYes team may accumulate 500-700 brides who should be properly guided. For each of the dresses, the bride is provided 5 days to send her measurements. A salesperson has to check hundreds of people to see if the measurements have been sent or not.

When SheSaidYes were running processes in Excel, all these steps took a tremendous amount of time for employees. In Flowlu, they’ve created a sales funnel with the necessary stages and set up automation. This way, they do not forget about anyone and give every bride enough attention.

The team added email templates to automation rules to save time. They also included reminders and automatic updating of information. Now each sales funnel stage has its own automatic actions triggered. This saves time and prevents employees from making errors.

Automation and a proper sales funnel help the team throughout the entire sales cycle. For instance, now if a bride hasn’t sent her measurements in five days, the salesperson sees this information on the kanban board at a glance and contacts her instantly. The team has also integrated an online payment gateway and can invoice the client at the cross-selling stage with the option to pay via PayPal.

Such an automated approach allowed SheSaidYes to improve the customer satisfaction and increase revenue.

2. Production

Moving into the production phase means that the team now has all the information they need to start sewing. When an opportunity moves to this stage of the funnel, a project is immediately created. The tailor is automatically added to the project team (thanks to automation rules, again). All further actions continue in the project. The project is created based on a pre-saved template, which enumerates all the main steps, milestones and tasks for the team.

Usually, a tailor sews apparel for a considerable period of time. Moreover, up to 16 people can participate in creating a single dress. That is why it is important to effectively track the production progress and monitor deadlines. This ensures that all orders are sent on time. The project Kanban board comes in handy here and clearly shows the status of each dress.

The SheSaidYes team does their best to make their clients feel as comfortable as possible. They understand that it is highly stressful to entrust to sew your most important dress remotely in the other part of the world.

For that reason, they developed a special process to minimize the brides’ anxiety and increase the number of customer points of contact. The best part is that they managed to implement all these processes inside Flowlu. This has resulted in an 80% satisfaction rate with the company’s services, which they consider as a very high result for the industry.

The Bottom Line

What I love most about Flowlu is that when I log in, I can see exactly how many opportunities are in the pipeline right now. This is one of the most important indicators for me as a manager. I also monitor that there are no overdue activities in the sales funnel. And if there are any, we analyze together with the team why it happened.

Flowlu helped the SheSaidYes team to improve the order fulfillment process and efficiently organize the interaction between the departments. Flowlu process automation has helped to increase the level of customer service and save time for both managers and employees.