JL Gaddy started to look at new ways their sales team could get better insight into accounts.

“We knew that ranking accounts by sales volume didn’t equate to profitability,” said Leanne Jennings, JL Gaddy vice president. “Our sales reps were in the dark and didn’t know which accounts they needed to spend more time with.”

After hearing about the Nowsight Sales Dashboard from colleagues, Jennings and her team dove in to analyze the opportunity. What they found was a customizable dashboard that showed the health of the business, account-by-account. The Nowsight Sales Dashboard is designed for visual at-a-glance trend spotting and the ability to drill down for more insights with just a click. It shows category sales, return percentage, current sales (and how that compares to best ever and historical time frames) and, most critically, per-order profitability. And each sales rep had their own color-coded territory dashboard so they can stay focused on their highest impact accounts.

Jennings knew these were the insights they needed to grow the JL Gaddy business. She and her team rolled out real-time dashboards that were personalized for each rep. They could see per-account profitability over time and order-by order. They could see if a customer ordered a SKU that had been discontinued—so they could reach out and find a replacement and save the sale. And the impact on the business was immediate.

“We saw an immediate reduction in underperforming accounts because we had a clear way to focus on them with clear milestones to hit,” said Jennings. “The dashboards are the basis of our weekly sales team calls. If we have a question about what’s going on in an account, the first thing we do is check Nowsight because all the information we need is right there—from a summary level, to drilling-down into specific invoices or orders. And instead of focusing just on volume of sales, we’re having conversations about profitability and trying to improve that with our service.”

The JL Gaddy team focus is working. Underperforming accounts were improved to the point where the leadership team raised profitability targets and are hitting those new numbers. “We know we have the tool to succeed,” said Jennings. “The Nowsight Sales Dashboard is now a must-have tool for our business.”

Staying ahead of the competition has always been a challenge given the vast number of SKUs and product types JL Gaddy customers stock. Spotting changes in orders, over time, was impossible. The combination of Business Intelligence (BI) with Artificial Intelligence (AI) drives these insights.

“With Nowsight, each sales rep is shown trends within every account, as soon as they are detected. For example, if cigarette carton sales have dropped below average, the rep can reach out to the customer and see if it’s a pricing issue, or if something else is going on. Not only does this help revenue and profitability, but it also shows our customers that we are partners in their success and that we are paying attention to them,” added Jennings.

And, because the sales team knows the highest-margin products and categories, they can focus on up-selling those, driving immediate improvements to the bottom line.

After setting profitability thresholds, all JL Gaddy accounts were then color-coded green, yellow, or red, based on where they fell.

“We never had a true way to rank our customers before,” said Jennings. “It immediately gave our team a way to focus—let’s address the red accounts. What we found out very quickly was that our team, armed with the right data, was able to have information-driven conversations with customers. Sometimes, we didn’t stock products they wanted and in other cases it was price or convenience. It’s tempting to think we never want to lose a client but seeing the numbers—where it was costing us more to serve accounts than we made—helped us clearly make those decisions.”

Nowsight prides ourselves on white-glove implementation and deeply understanding each client’s business. “With just 15-minute calls, once a week, Nowsight was able to connect our systems and turn around requested enhancements quickly,” said Jennings. “It was pretty fast from the time we signed up to having a platform we could go to the street with.”

“We understand our customers aren’t IT experts–they’re business leaders who want real-time access to data so they can make decisions to grow their business and they don’t care what system the information sits in–they need it in one place,” adds Michael Schader, Nowsight CEO. “That’s why we combine our technical prowess with proven business leadership experience to deliver a solution that works for customers like JL Gaddy.”

Having a single, united view of the business has helped the JL Gaddy leadership team make smarter decisions, faster.

“Having seamless, real-time data accessible in the office and in the field has improved our operations dramatically,” adds Jennings. “If it’s hard to use—like our old spreadsheets—people just won’t do it. Now, our sales representatives are even able to share sales trends with their accounts, making us a partner in their success.”