Galls + Zendesk: Sell delivers higher sales capacity and increased speed to revenue

When America’s first responders need uniforms and public safety equipment, Galls stands ready with a massive inventory to quickly fulfill orders for thousands of agencies and departments across the country. Each year, more than one million men and women trust Galls to supply essential gear.

Galls services the needs of law enforcement, military, security, fire, EMS, postal and public transportation employees with a personalized web portal that makes ordering easy, fast, and convenient.

To help drive even greater efficiencies, Galls determined that it needed to replace a home-grown CRM system with a tool that offered more robust functionality and reporting. After evaluating Salesforce and BPM Company, Galls ultimately chose Zendesk Sell for its sales CRM solution.

“Finding out the ease with which Zendesk Sell could be implemented and used across the business was paramount to our decision,” says Dan Martin, senior director of sales administration and customer experience at Galls. “The short timeline for implementation was also very important.”

Gaining visibility into the sales process and pipeline

One of the top priorities for the Galls team was to gain visibility into the sales pipeline, since the previous CRM system didn’t have the ability to integrate pipeline expectations and the sales process. “Prior to Zendesk, our executive team didn’t have visibility into the deal flows and overall sales pipeline,” says Jim Dugan, chief revenue officer for Galls. “Our monthly operating reviews and all of our board reporting now come directly out of Zendesk. We have socialized them to the way we use Zendesk in our pipeline. It’s created a common language.”

The Galls team worked with Zendesk to customize the sales solution to its pipeline and sales process. Through that exercise, the company was able to leverage Zendesk tools around Smart Lists and other reporting to understand what was going on in the business on a day-to-day basis.

“All the visibility we have in place now with Zendesk has created a lot more confidence and credibility in how we talk about sales activity. That’s been super powerful for our organization,” added Dugan.

Sales efficiencies and mobile capabilities

Another strategic priority for Galls was to create greater sales capacity, freeing up sales reps from administrative work to give them more time for proactive selling. Prior to Zendesk and other tools the company has invested in, Galls’ reps were spending as much as 50 percent on non-selling activities. With the new CRM solution and other enhancements, sales reps now spend only about 20 percent of their time on administrative tasks, which allows for 80 percent of their time to be dedicated to sales and revenue-producing activities.

The Zendesk Sell solution has also enabled mobile functionality for the 20 to 25 percent of sales reps who work remotely. The reps can easily log activities through their mobile phone when they are out meeting with customers. They can also use geolocation features to quickly see what other prospects or current customers are nearby and stop in to make that route much more efficient.

“If a pipeline opportunity is created from an onsite customer appointment, sales reps can quickly add in a deal or a quote to the pipeline,” says Martin. “The mobile app further enhances sales efficiencies by allowing real-time logging of sales activities and entering deals into the system.”

Customer onboarding as an unexpected bonus

As the Zendesk solution was being implemented, the Galls team was also re-engineering its customer onboarding process. Customers of a sufficient size are onboarded, which refers to a more complex engagement with the customer to give them access to the company’s EQUIP platform. This custom online system offers real-time reporting and dashboards, setting up ease of ordering for public safety agencies and their employees.

Galls saw the opportunity to customize Zendesk Sell for the onboarding process without having to purchase additional project management software.

“It’s really been terrific for us,” says Martin. “We use it like the pipeline in that we can tell at any point in time the status of a particular onboarding project. In fact, we have managed to reduce the time of the onboarding process from 100 days to 80 days which translates to a 20 percent improvement in speed to revenue.”

Innovation for the future

Another new project underway at Galls is utilizing the Zendesk CRM platform to drive B2B marketing campaigns.

“Zendesk has allowed us to create campaigns and reps can tag their contacts to receive those campaign assets via email,” says Dugan. “Down the road, we are looking to implement predictive marketing where the system identifies customers who would benefit from a certain promotion or offering and then trigger a customer outreach activity.”

A new slogan at Galls is ‘if it’s not in Zendesk, then it doesn’t exist.’ “We want it top of mind for our users that you need to be using Zendesk. It’s a tool for you to do your job better, but it’s also a communication and data hub to share information across the entire company,” says Martin.

Eventually, the Galls team would like to have an all Zendesk solution, according to Martin. “That would definitely simplify everything we’re trying to do, which is to make the sales process as seamless as possible for our sellers, allowing them to communicate and use multiple platforms without having to jump from application to application.”

With its focus on business optimization for both its customers and employees, it is clear that Galls is on the right track for continued growth and success.