Rohan Santora is on a mission to change the way dealers think about their customer relationship management (CRM) tools. The director of sales for The Sailor Group/AgentDealer knows the humble CRM has more to offer beyond being merely a sales and forecasting management vehicle, and a slew of partnerships with ConnectWise, In Time Tec and Sales ScoreKeeper—and an expansion of its Formstack relationship—have exceeded those boundaries to create a singularly unique value proposition for AgentDealer.
In this segment of Two-Minute Drill, Santora explores how his integration-infused platform touches on specific elements of a dealer’s business, including managed print and managed IT, as well as new tools for compensation plan and commission management. He also shares his vision for expanding AgentDealer and providing greater insights into what’s on top for 2023 and beyond. There is a lot of information from Santora to share with the dealer community, and he’s making it a priority to spread the gospel this year.
What would you say was the highlight of 2022 for AgentDealer?
Santora: I think for us, 2022 was the culmination of 2-3 years of tremendous growth. There’s been a major shift within the dealer channel in the awareness of who we are and how different our platform is in context to CRM. It is apparent now that dealers are starting to recognize the extent to which our platform can be extended into real-world business processes via customization and integration, not just related to the front-line sales team. For us, that led to some serious growth in 2020 and 2021, and in 2022 we had to address that with tremendous expansion to our technical staff. It was challenging to bring on a bunch of new people at the same time as dealing with exponential growth in which new projects needed to be completed. We had some bumps and bruises along the way but have come out the other side better for it and are ready to roll in 2023.
Your company embarked on a number of key partnerships, from ConnectWise and In Time Tec to Formstack. Talk a little about the value of these integrations and how they can strengthen AgentDealer’s ability to scale.
Santora: Well, Formstack has been a partner for several years as it’s the core of our document merge capabilities in AgentDealer. It’s allowed us to do some great things with generating account reviews, proposals, leases and other contract documents. It really opens up a new world for dealers who want to automate the document creation process in relation to deals and common sales activities like QBR/account reviews. We expanded on that in 2022 to include their Forms capability so our platform can extend to external stakeholders like customers and prospects for data collection and population back into the CRM platform for other processes.
InTimeTec and ConnectWise have both been in the works for some time and each address specific areas of dealer business in MPS and managed IT, and the real-world needs for each. Our integration with InTimeTec allows us to address the manual efforts associated with dealers having to manage their list of printers and associated CPP for our TCO for MPS analysis tool. It provides a managed list of printers and MFPs with their associated base information and market CPP pricing so that dealers just have to keep up with their MPS CPP program offerings to drive the tool instead of having to worry about adding and researching that information on any new printer that comes to market.
Our ConnectWise integration is more akin to an ERP integration in that we are connected to CW Manage and can exchange data with all of their main tables in a bidirectional fashion. Dealers have the ability to choose which types of records they would like to sync and how so that it can fit their specific managed IT sales process goals. As a result, this gives dealers the ability to keep the sales reps within the CRM platform for activity, pipeline and forecasting for sales management and reporting, but also allows ConnectWise to be used as intended without the sales personnel jumping between platforms and duplicating efforts to accommodate management goals in both systems.
I think in addition to the partnerships mentioned above, another important one to mention is Sales ScoreKeeper. Their team has completely changed how their commission and compensation plan management platform can integrate with a CRM like AgentDealer. Our partnership with them has resulted in a bidirectional integration that completely automates commissions, bonuses, and category-based payouts for things like managed IT, MPS, production, etc., because of the way the platforms work together. It all comes together with complete visibility within our CRM for the commissions and quota obtainment results so that sales management teams can have the information they need within the CRM platform instead of navigating other platforms to collect and assemble all of that combined sales data.
We feel like all of this extends the CRM for sales, as well as into other processes, while it helps to consolidate the efforts and management in those processes across each dealer organization.
How can you push beyond the boundaries of the CRM and bring even more value to the office technology dealer?
Santora: CRM has traditionally been pigeonholed into a sales activity and forecast-only management tool by most dealers. Some platforms offered more capabilities to extend into the actual quoting and sales order process but were often not utilized completely because of how they worked or because they weren’t user-friendly. AgentDealer allows us to tailor that experience and functionality more to each dealer’s preferences, and then extend it out into other areas like managed services, logistics, water, coffee, charging stations, ecommerce, you name it. If you can sell it, our platform can help to manage sales activities around it, quote it, forecast it properly, utilize workflow automation, and then extend it into other platforms necessary in its business processes. We believe that’s the value dealers are looking for in modern CRM platforms.
What’s on tap for 2023 and what do you hope to accomplish?
Santora: There is a lot on the development side that the channel will be hearing about from us in 2023, including some major initiatives with Keypoint Intelligence (read more here) and others, but we also want to get the word out about some of our own internal updates and initiatives with the platform. One of the things that’s a challenge when you go through major growth cycles is keeping everyone informed of cool new things. We do a lot of customization for dealers, and some of that leads to new functionality in the platform. For us, our resources have been focused on completing deployments for the last few years and I think now that we’ve gotten so much accomplished, we’d like to start getting the word out about what’s available to do with AgentDealer that the channel may not know about.
We’re going to start a quarterly newsletter and get back to our email campaigns so that our dealer customers can learn about new capabilities and make decisions on those how they may fit into their current CRM processes and best practices. Some of this will come via sharing of success stories from us directly, and others will come through the dealer peer groups as they share with each other about what each is doing. One way or another, we’ll get this information disseminated to the channel so that they can all take advantage of how our platform can help them do business better.
