Sprague

Sprague, founded in 1870 and headquartered in Portsmouth, NH, is an energy and materials handling service company that supplies the Northeast with gasoline, natural gas, diesel fuels, and home heating oil. Now with nearly 1,000 employees, Sprague’s focus remains on customer success.

Sprague sales teams worked with a standard email integration tool for Salesforce and Outlook, but the software’s limitations led to adoption issues and inadequate email recording. The existing software was also difficult to update and a drain on internal IT resources. Sprague needed a solution that would reliably streamline communication archiving for the sales teams.

“We made an internal decision to expand our use of Salesforce throughout the company,” said Shana Hoch, Director of Marketing and Customer Experience for Sprague. “We soon realized we needed a better tool to more easily enable the reps to enter timely, accurate information in Salesforce.” The solution also needed to be approved by the IT team from a maintenance and deployment perspective.

Sprague decided to evaluate alternate email integration solutions but found that several employees were already using LinkPoint Connect on their own. “Our sales users are required to record all account activity, and one of the sales managers found LinkPoint Connect to be a great help in this effort,” said Hoch. “If interactions are not reflected in Salesforce, then the sales reps do not receive credit for them.” After a vetting process that included additional sales users, management, and the IT team, Sprague decided that LinkPoint Connect was the right choice for the entire team.

Email recording was vital to the success of the sales team, and LinkPoint Connect seamlessly fulfilled the requirements to mitigate the issues regarding recording more efficiently in Salesforce. “LinkPoint Connect gave us the tools to connect Outlook to Salesforce in a much more streamlined fashion,” said Hoch.

LinkPoint360 Professional Services also customized Sprague’s installer to show additional record details in the email Record Window. “The customization allowed us to pull in other fields so that users can be sure they are logging emails to the right account record,” said Hoch. “Our organization spans several different energy sectors and has completed several acquisitions, leaving us with a complex Salesforce instance that LinkPoint Connect effectively supports.”

Sprague sales users experienced efficiency gains working between Outlook and Salesforce. “Our reps want to be as efficient as possible closing new customer sales,” said Hoch. Sprague made sure that essential sales staff had access to LinkPoint Connect and over time added new users based on request and growth needs. “The sales managers love it too as it grants greater visibility for accountability, and the reps have more time to pursue more sales because it’s so much more efficient,” said Hoch.

Sprague’s internal IT teams appreciated the ease of deploying and maintaining the software. LinkPoint Connect’s automatic updates manage enhancements to the software across all users. As new sales reps join Sprague, the team is able to install the software in a matter of minutes.

“LinkPoint Connect has become such a big part of our day-to-day lives,” said Hoch. Sprague’s sales reps were accustomed to working mainly in Outlook, and LinkPoint Connect enabled them to continue working where they felt most comfortable while still populating essential Salesforce data. “It’s nice to help our sales teams work in one system while still benefiting from the communication and data within Salesforce,” said Hoch.