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Customer Story

Portco Packaging

“Our experience with Gold-Vision has been exceptional.  They really took the time to understand our process and what we needed out of a CRM and ultimately designed something that exceeded our expectations.”

Linda Malmstadt, VP of Sales & Marketing

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https://www.portco.com/

Company

Portco Packaging is a third-generation run food packaging company based in Washington state. They pride themselves in responsibly manufacturing high-quality, safe packaging for their loyal customers in a way that reflects company principles. Portco was one of the first west coast packaging companies to receive the highest level of SQF accreditation for food safety within the industry sector. 

Linda Malmstadt has been with the company for 31 years and is the VP of Sales and Marketing. She started her journey with the company as an inside sales representative, moving into outside sales and then into sales management. She has been in her current role as VP of Sales and Marketing for just over 3 years.

The challenge

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the need for Portco Packaging’s salesforce, account management, and customer support teams to work remotely. In turn, the company took the time to reflect on their current processes and how they could improve them. Managing customer data through spreadsheets and exporting other data from the ERP was creating a lack of visibility, along with the task of keeping up-to-date with sales order logging, internal and external communications, and sales reporting.

The company required a more effective means of consolidating this information around a central database, especially as delivering high quality products to their clients is a central tenant of Portco Packaging’s mission. The need for a CRM software that would give Portco a 360 ° view was quickly identified as the solution to continue to meet the growing demands of their loyal customer base. 

The Gold-Vision CRM solution

Portco Packaging discovered Gold-Vision through their G2 Software review and reached out for a call and demo. The initial call allowed for the team to communicate the challenges they were facing as a business and the requirements they were looking for from a CRM perspective. Gold-Vision was able to address the major points in the call which advanced to a couple of live demonstrations of the CRM system in follow-up calls.

Portco Packaging appreciated the personalized approach that the team at Gold-Vision took in configuring a live system rather than a standard demo of the product. Gold-Vision paid close attention to the company’s needs which allowed them to envision how their service could be a great fit in capturing their business workflow. The team at Gold-Vision built a trusted relationship from the initial interactions and therefore Portco Packaging was confident in choosing them as a trusted business partner for their CRM project.

“For me, Gold-Vision provides real-time access to all sales-related activities including active opportunities and pipeline projections. It provides at a glance account information and the customizable dashboard allows me to see what’s most important to me, the minute I log on. And being able to export almost any information into a report for use outside the system has proven extremely helpful.”

CRM requirements

  • One central location for customer information
  • Sales opportunity management
  • Real-time visibility tracking for sales and product delivery
  • Organise personal tasks
  • Business and personalised dashboards for accurate reporting

Working with Gold-Vision

Gold-Vision CRM took the time to thoroughly understand Portco Packaging’s business as a whole and ensure that the CRM would be an enabling tool for the team to complete their daily activities. It was important that the CRM fit their specific method of working rather than an obligatory “task” that the sales and customer support people must complete. Portco Packaging appreciated the attention to detail as this reinforced confidence that they made the right decision with a trusted business partner for their CRM system.

In addition, Portco Packaging had a positive training experience where Gold-Vision broke down the various sessions to concentrate on specific areas at a time. This allowed for the information to be easily digested rather than being overwhelmed with information overload. The other aspect of the training Portco Packaging particularly liked was Gold-Vision’s heuristic approach that allowed for the users to share their screen and be guided through the system to solidify the team’s understanding of the areas they need to be acquainted with.

Finally, Portco Packaging appreciated the additional detail and assistance Gold-Vision provided them with going live where minor configuration tweaks were necessary to ensure the system was 100% correct.

Benefits & results

Though it is still in its early days, initial results show individual users:

  • An up-to-date sales process allowing them to see each of their opportunities and the exact stage and timestamp of the last action
  • Email exchanges that they have had with their clients through mail tracking
  • Internal notes that have been broadcast from other colleagues if there is something that needs to be addressed
  • A complete picture of all of the activities that are happening with each individual account or an overview of all their activities across their accounts
  • Consolidation of processes and data from disparate locations into a single point of truth

“Overall, implementing Gold-Vision will convert to time savings for Portco Packaging’s business and therefore streamline our processes to spend more time selling and having face time with our customers. Furthermore, the team has more visibility on both internal and external communication that enables a tighter collaboration between all stakeholders involved in the sales process and product specification production of orders.”

Looking ahead

The next phase of Gold-Vision engagement will be for Portco Packaging to explore the marketing campaigns area of the system. The company takes pride in building strong and loyal relationships with their customers. Therefore, performing effective account-based marketing campaigns is something they currently do, but Gold-Vision will enhance this business activity with its fully integrated marketing functionality to the accounts and contacts of the system. Portco Packaging will then start building and tracking targeted account-based marketing campaigns that further engage their customers.

Portco Packaging generates many of their new leads by attending expos and trade shows. Post-pandemic they intend to utilize more of the lead management functionality of the system with lead lists. Gold-Vision’s lead management system is a convenient way to import leads into the system and easily be able to discard the poor-quality leads from the good quality ones that can be promoted creating an opportunity.

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