Rhino: Supporting Sandhurst’s passion for fine food

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Sandhurst Fine Foods was established in 1988, working with the nation’s largest wholesalers to bring high-quality food to Australians. But the enterprise’s passion for nourishing people goes a lot further back. Sandhurst owes much of its foodie heritage to its owners ancestry in regional Italy, where generation after generation poured their lives into working with the seasons to produce fresh food.

For many years Sandhurst ran its sales team and worked with client meetings in a traditional pen-and-paper system. Nothing wrong with the old-fashioned ways – but the business needed a more modern way to support sales and improved visibility in operations. That’s why they started with Rhino CRM 7 years ago, and haven’t looked back. We sat down with National Sales Manager Tony Fedele to discuss how the Rhino sales CRM has benefited Sandhurst.

Learning from the past, looking to the future

”The way we were working, with pen and paper, wasn’t competitive. It was easy to lose notes, forget details you covered in a previous meeting. Preparedness is key for success, and we just weren’t as prepared as we could have been,” says Tony.

Rhino sales CRM platformSandhurst’s passion for good food needed a sophisticated sales CRM platform to match.

He was first introduced to Rhino CRM through a business contact and was very impressed with the software’s functionality and adaptability. After a few meetings and a product demo, Tony knew this was the right solution for Sandhurst.

”What really drew me to Rhino CRM was the customisation. We needed a specific set of functions – and ForteIS didn’t hesitate to tailor the platform to suit our needs,” Tony says.

At a time when the business was considering CRM solutions from a number of different suppliers, this adaptable scalability was the deciding factor – and Sandhurst has enjoyed the benefits of Rhino CRM in its day-to-day sales functions ever since.

What really drew me to Rhino sales CRM was the customisation.

The benefits of Rhino CRM

One benefit of adopting Rhino CRM is that Sandhurst’s sales contact history, meeting notes and product pricing information are all now stored in one location. This makes drawing the data you need during a sales conversation simpler. Additionally, Tony’s sales team can add notes and comments to meeting or sales reports to give future readers or senior management further context when breaking down data. Rhino CRM also makes it easier to assess individual sales people, check on their strengths, and find opportunities to improve performance.

”The modern sales landscape is getting tougher, so Rhino CRM is a real leg-up on our competitors,” says Tony. ”It has helped myself and the team greatly, but most importantly the platform has given us a better understanding of our market. Instant access to the information we need means fewer delays and more quality contact time with customers”.

An old-fashioned love affair with food strengthened by new technology – Rhino CRM couldn’t have made things any simpler. For help with getting more out of your sales team, contact the ForteIS team today for a free demo!

How CRM and sales incentives are closely intertwined

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Incentives and recognition both play a large role in improving sales performance. Here’s how you can use CRM to unlock an incentive’s full potential.

Read more →

What are the most critical features of a CRM?

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By now, you probably know your business needs a powerful CRM system to help you manage contacts and accounts. Choosing the right CRM system is the next step.

In a market so saturated with convoluted solutions, it can be hard to understand exactly what features you need to ensure your chosen CRM delivers great uptake rates and improved customer relationships.

In this article, we break down the most important features to look for in a CRM system.

1. Basic CRM features

There are a few basic things every CRM system should be capable of handling to be considered a functional tool. Core CRM features include:

  • Contact management: Building a searchable, organised database of customer information.
  • Call planning: Enabling smarter, more centralised call planning to ensure time is optimised, territories are serviced and customer relationships are nurtured.
  • Simple reporting: Creating visibility and insight into customer health and sales team performance.

These key features enable your team to work digitally within parameters of a single cloud-based data repository for all of your customer information.

Woman using a CRM system on her tablet, calling a customer and smiling.The right CRM allows your sales people to plan and execute meaningful business calls.

2. Ease of use

We’ve written at length about the importance of user friendliness in CRM systems in our blog post ‘7 reasons to adopt a user-friendly CRM system‘. Nonetheless, it bears repeating. If there’s one thing to take away, it’s this: nearly three-quarters of experienced senior executives surveyed would trade CRM functionality for ease of use, reports industry observer Niall Byrne.

3. Integration

Integration is crucial to ensure your CRM fits into your wider technology suite. Unless you plan to hinge your entire digital strategy around your chosen CRM, it’s important to check the system is capable of integrating with your existing (or future) enterprise resource planning (ERP) software or digital systems. Powerful CRM systems should connect with an API to allow for real-time integration, supporting the ease of use and reducing administrative load on your sales team and managers. Alternatively, depending on your existing systems, data transfer via FTP server should also be an option for your chosen CRM.

4. Automated and customisable reporting

While reporting is a basic CRM feature, it should be flexible. No two businesses are the same, so you need to have the freedom to manipulate data to gain insights uniquely critical to your business.

Customisable reporting allows you to segment your reports according to demographic and industry, customer health, value, sales period and other key dimensions needed to inform your business decisions and sales strategy.

Flexible CRM reporting ensures you can gain insights relevant to you.Get more relevant insights with customisable CRM reports.

5. Remote access

Our lives are spent on-the-go, doubly so for busy sales people who attend frequent face-to-face meetings. For this reason, “cloud-based” has moved beyond being a buzzword to an expectation. Sales people must be able to access CRM data from any internet-enabled device, so the information critical to their next meeting is available when and where they need it.

That said, some meetings may take place away from areas with mobile data coverage. In these instances, it’s important your sales people can still access and update customer information. Ideally, your CRM should be capable of hosting information locally and automatically backing up to the cloud upon reaching a connection.

6. Security

With cloud hosting can come security concerns. You need your CRM to promise rigid and secure hosting services to protect against cyber attacks or accidental breaches. Look for a CRM tool with customisable user access privileges to allow for careful management of sensitive data.

For a CRM that offers everything you need with none of the hoopla, turn to Rhino by Forte IS. Book a demo today to find out more.

Customer relationship management just got simpler. Find out how Rhino chargers through the nonsense of CRM.

Why you need sales reporting to seize the right opportunities

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Your sales team are bringing in sales and your customers are happy – but are you seizing every opportunity to help your business grow?

Becoming complacent about how and when your business is growing is a surefire way to get left in the dust of your competitors, so it's important to find insights into areas for potential improvement. This is where sales reporting comes in. Equipped with a powerful and easy-to-use CRM, you can easily see where performance is excelling or lacking and adjust your efforts accordingly.

Let's discuss the purpose of sales reports and the many benefits they can bring to your business.

The purpose of sales reporting

Basing your performance analysis on revenue alone is a bit like skipping straight to the end of a book.

First of all, why do you need sales reporting? Your revenue at the end of the week, month or quarter may seem like a fairly solid indicator of your sales performance. However, basing your performance analysis on this figure alone is a bit like skipping straight to the end of a book. You've reached a conclusion without any context or understanding of how you got there.

Sales reporting, as powered by a great CRM system, allows you to look at every step of the sales and account management process. This means you can see where customers are losing interest, if any accounts are being neglected or if particular reps are bringing in more upsells than others.

There's more to growing your business than just the number of sales made – you need to see the whole story behind that number to really make the most of your efforts.

With this in mind, what reports are most useful in tracking your sales performance? Rhino, the CRM from the team at ForteIS comes prepackaged with a number of off-the-shelf reports to generate quick insights, as well as allowing for individual data manipulation.

Simple sales reporting lets you see the journey behind your end-of-period figures.Simple sales reporting lets you see the journey behind your end-of-period figures.

Salesperson performance insights

Rhino's Rep Overview reports allow you to isolate the data according to the salespeople who entered it. This lets you see exactly how well salespeople are performing in terms of call performance and spot any opportunities for improvement or recognition.

Your Rep Overview reports will be vital for individual performance reviews, but also for identifying larger trends across the business. If customer calls are dropping across the board, it could prompt introspection into the structure of your sales process, for example.

Account management benefits

Rhino comes equipped with a number of reports that grant a quick look into the health of your customer accounts.

See which accounts are lacking attention with the Call Frequency by Account report. From there, the Account Overview report provides easy access to all account information, including contacts, call notes and sales activity. This lets you see the bigger picture behind why an account may not be receiving regular calls – such as unresponsive contacts, rocky customer relationships or otherwise.

Similarly, Gap Analysis reports allow you identify opportunities to maximise your customer relationships, highlighting accounts in need of a call, lacking distribution or who are in need of attention through customised surveys relevant to the insights you want your team to capture.

Data manipulation

The above reports are just scratching the surface of the power of Rhino. Develop custom reports or export data in .csv format for further manipulation and reporting as required. Manage data behind marketing campaigns and events, and build unique surveys to capture quantitative and qualitative data about your customers and activity in every call.

With every business operating in their own unique way, it's vital your CRM is capable of adapting to how you and your salespeople work. Reap the benefits of simple sales reporting – reach out to ForteIS for a free demo of Rhino today.

Find out how Rhino charges through the nonsense of CRM.