McHale Plant Sales

McHale Plant Sales, one of Ireland’s leading machinery sales companies, was established in 1952, and founded by Michael McHale Snr. Over a quarter of a century ago, the nature and character of their company were transformed when they were appointed distributors in Ireland for the Komatsu range of construction equipment. Today, the company has a respected presence within the construction equipment sector in Ireland, having deep and long-established connections to all the main contractors and plant users. 
 
McHale continues to go from strength to strength. Prodigy caught up with Darragh O’Driscoll, Head of Business Development on the transition to Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and how it helps the business to keep growing.

 

Challenges 

Over a decade ago McHale Plant Sales used Goldmine CRM but adoption was limited and the use of the system was abandoned, reverting to the use of spreadsheets, paper diaries, and a sales WhatsApp group to power their sales function. “We wanted to bring in a better CRM system to manage our contacts with prospects and customers more effectively and, ultimately, to help us increase our sales. It is important that there are regular and trackable touchpoints with prospects and customers to record our sales efforts. As we grew, we wanted to transition from paper-based systems to fully-fledged CRM with better contact management and reporting capability” Darragh told us. Like most sales leaders on the search for new systems, Darragh engaged with a number of alternatives, but “It was the functionality and reputation of Salesforce that really sold it to us.”  
 
Prodigy helped McHale optimise and evolve their Sales Cloud instance and Darragh stated that “The tracking of contacts and opportunities and activity against them was very hard, and we couldn’t clearly and quickly see the potential new customers closing with a click.”  
 
“This brought the risk that opportunities could be missed and that something would slip through the cracks.”

 

Solution

Prodigy worked with McHale to improve their Sales Cloud set up. “Sales Cloud is very adaptable and configurable. With the help of the team at Prodigy, we have been able to create the fields we need, implement the correct sales stages, and remove stages that are not relevant. This flexibility has been important so we can fit it to how McHale does sales and business development”.   
 
The reporting capability in areas such as call activity, opportunities, and inventory management has been insightful, and even finding out with a few clicks what products and brands are selling best and to what customers have given us very useful management information.”
 
Prodigy helped McHale build out their inventory, sales stages, lead stages, and datacapturing capability and provided training to Darragh and his team. In fact, Prodigy is working currently to demo some other solutions that may help on the service and finance side for the McHale team.

On Prodigy

On the material impact it’s made on the business, Darragh mentioned “Previously, the sales team would have sent WhatsApp messages with their daily sales activity. We’ve replaced it now with automated reports where details of customer interactions are captured as the team record calls on Salesforce as well as details of potential deals. This is much more efficient and trackable.”  
 
It has also proved useful in terms of addressing sales queries for team members. “If any of the sales team need pricing for a stock item or wish to view a detailed specification for specialised equipment, the information is more readily available on Salesforce and the team also has the option to ping me and other colleagues with the Chatter function. This is something I would like to see rolled out across the team as it saves time and improves the accuracy of information.”  
 
It has also helped with reporting to key suppliers (manufacturers who supply the machinery).  “For example, we report to Komatsu every month in relation to deals invoiced in the prior month as well as outstanding customer sales orders. The reporting on Sales Cloud has been very helpful in this regard.”

Project Snapshot