LGG Industrial Increases Prospects, Efficiency with SugarSell

LGG Industrial recently underwent a radical branding change. The Pittsburgh, Pa., company, which has been operating since 1935, started its go-to-market planning in late 2023 when it was still named ERIKS North America, with plans to launch the new strategy and new name by the end of the first quarter of 2024. LGG is short for Lewis, Goetz, and Goodall, its foundational brands.

“Everything was going to be new about us,” says Tim Billingsley, the company’s vice president of revenue operations.

And that change carried over to every aspect of the business, which sells fluid handling, sealing, and material conveyance solutions. “We had to invest in a revenue operations department, which meant that we were going to be evaluating our entire suite of technology, all of our processes, and all of those things that we needed to support sellers,” Billingsley says.

To continue growing, the company needed a new sales system because the old one was antiquated and “didn’t add any value,” according to Billingsley.

A cross-functional team from across the organization developed a comprehensive list of 119 requirements for the new technology, then the search team evaluated a dozen solutions and vendors to find one that met most of those requirements.

That initial list was paired down to five. Deeper evaluations reduced that list to three, with SugarCRM’s SugarSell technology eventually winning out due to its flexibility, agility, and out-of-the-box capabilities.

SugarCRM differentiated itself by taking the time during the discovery process to truly understand LLG as a business—where it was and why the 119 requirements were important, Billingsley says. “They helped us understand some of those requirements. Then they came to us with a crawl-walk-run road map.”

Included in the road map were a suggested launch date and a timeline for ramping up complexity, according to Billingsley. “They really embraced the partnership; they didn’t just try to push a product on us and tell us why they were fancy, that everyone else uses them and we should, too. They wanted to know what we were trying to accomplish.”

LGG Industrial selected the solution at the end of the first quarter, then LGG Industrial worked with SugarCRM to bring in data from LGG’s legacy CRM system, integrate with its enterprise resource planning system, and determine the right look and feel for the company’s users.

That process took nearly half a year, with the SugarSell solution going live just before the end of the third quarter of 2024.

“We realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t just about the technology and the back-end interfaces,” Billingsley says. “If you have good technology but bad processes, you just do wrong things faster. So we developed an entirely new sales process. We took the 12 steps we had down to four by simplifying and streamlining the way we thought about the customer journey. SugarCRM helped us re-evaluate and restructure our customer hierarchy. That’s why this is such a great partnership. If we had gone live with the existing structure we had for how we group our customers, the system would not have been as useful for us as it was.”

With the SugarSell system, LGG Industrial was able to add 3,000 new contacts to a central database; previously, they were scattered across many mobile phones and spreadsheets throughout the organization. User adoption increased from 20 percent to 80 percent, while pipeline opportunities grew by a factor of four.

“CRM isn’t about where you’ve been and what you’ve done, it’s about where you’re going,” Billingsley adds. So the company is working to determine how to leverage the information it has already put into the system to gain additional customer insights.

“We’re having conversations with Sugar about their AI capabilities and some of their business intelligence tools that will allow us to harvest and mine data so that we can proactively push selling opportunities to our sales teams.” 

The Payoff

With SugarSell, LGG Industrial has done the following:

• simplified the sales process from 12 steps to four;
• increased user adoption from 20 percent to 80 percent;
• added 3,000 new contacts to its database; and
• increased pipeline opportunities by a factor of four.