As we stroll down busy avenues in civic centers and business districts, many of us don’t give a second thought about concrete. We admire well-designed places but rarely consider one of the most basic materials used in shaping those spaces.

Fortunately for citizens and visitors of Colombia, the people at Kreato do. As an innovative player in Colombia’s dynamic construction industry, Kreato develops and manufactures top-quality prefabricated concrete products that mimic nature.

Driving Kreato’s work is their desire to develop close and long-lasting relationships with all their customers. Among them are some of the biggest names in Colombia’s construction business, such as Constructora Bolívar, Constructora Colpatria, and Amarilo.

The company sees their clients as friends and prefer to constantly stay on top of the relationship. To achieve this, it takes hard work and a smart customer relationship management (CRM) solution.

“Before I joined the company, Kreato used Excel to handle everything,” shares Sandra Ramirez, Commercial Coordinator at Kreato. “All the information was stored in the minds of commercial reps who had direct contact with the client. The company felt it did not have all the information it needed.”

Further, Kreato was struggling to quantify the clients and the opportunities. Although they had worked with tenders in the public sector for over a decade, the company still found it challenging to identify key opportunities in advance.

As construction projects take time and leads need to be nurtured for years, Kreato needed to foster those opportunities for years to understand their clients’ purchasing behavior.

Fragmented data and dispersed ownership

These challenges ignited Kreato’s growth. Even though sales reps had deep knowledge of Kreato’s clients, there wasn’t a centralized system for sharing business intelligence.

“Each sales rep had their own way of doing things,” Sandra adds. “The more experienced ones had a very different sales style to newer reps, and because of that, the information came to us in different ways.”

Any information Kreato did have was managed through Excel spreadsheets and limited what the company could do with their sales data. Their reps had to manually create charts, graphs, and pivot tables to generate meaningful insights.

“It is limited for commercial management, as we can’t identify purchasing behavior – it doesn’t tell us how we need to negotiate with a client or what experiences we’ve had,” Sandra explains.

Manual data entry also meant human errors, accidental deletions, and broken formulas that undermined the reliability of sales reports. With data in spreadsheets or reps’ memories, Kreato couldn’t integrate their sales information with other tools like marketing automation platforms or ERP systems.

This limited the company’s ability to synchronize data across systems, automate data entry, and streamline processes. Moreover, critical information was lost every time a sales rep left the company, which created difficulty in maintaining continuity with their clients.

“We did not even have a way to know how many clients and opportunities we had,” Sandra adds. ”We didn’t have the complete picture of the business.”

Quantifying success

The company started looking for a CRM platform that would serve as a home for their customer data and quantify everything sales-related to gain an accurate projection of their pipeline. Kreato chose SugarAI and worked on an initial rollout with a consultant, to later partner with SASA and deploy Sugar Sell.

“The approach and the service we got from SASA were very positive. They visited us several times. We also got to work with the team to address our specific needs. Starting to work with SASA made the processes much easier for us.”

With Sugar, Kreato could speed up their client segmentation and improved their sales quantification based on real data and valuable insights instead of intuition or gut feeling.

More importantly, Kreato can now see their customers’ purchasing habits. “We have been able to identify clients who quote a lot but don’t buy,” Sandra says. “We can also see who we’re closing 50% of deals with.

This information helps us act quickly when presenting new offers and deciding whom to target.”

The advantages of using Sugar were immediately apparent. “Sugar is a very flexible, user-friendly tool,” Sandra shares. “It was adapted perfectly to our company, for our needs. Its versatility is awesome, and it helped us structure the sales department in a better way.”

Achieving 100% customer coverage

In their pursuit of developing close client relationships, Kreato wants 100% coverage of all their customers and prospects. Sugar is instrumental in ensuring that happens by helping sales reps schedule follow-ups on potential deals.

All leads now get recorded on Sugar, making sure that no opportunity falls through the cracks. “Recently, we implemented Sugar’s Smart Guides to enable more flexibility in the data we collect,” Sandra says. “SASA also helped us integrate Sugar with our website so that prospects coming through the page automatically become a lead. SASA guided us in the process and supported our website provider.”

Managing long sales cycles has also become easier. Many of Kreato’s projects come from the public sector, and Sandra and her team constantly monitor bidding and offering platforms.

With Sugar, they now transfer all the relevant information into the Leads module and classify the opportunity long before Kreato establishes the first contact. “We feed leads to our database daily. We follow up on the tenders and contractors participating and keep entering relevant information in the CRM,” Sandra explains.

“Now I can visualize the business potential long before we start selling to them. We have tenders from 2011 that we are still selling to, and we have opportunities that were identified three years ago. Sugar helps us understand not only what we are selling now but also what opportunities will come in four years.”

Supporting day-to-day operations

With over 700 active clients, Sugar has become essential to the daily success of Kreato. For Sandra, it was a hard-won success, and the transition didn’t come easily. “Many of the older sales reps were reluctant to even use the new solution because they think it brings more complexity to their daily work,” Sandra shares. “But those who adopted Sugar can’t live without it anymore.”

Today, those reps rely on the platform for timely client follow-ups, monitoring opportunities, and tracking sales outcomes. “Working with Sugar and SASA was one of the best things for our sales team,” Sandra shares. “Sugar tells us everything. We have identified more than 8,800 opportunities through it.”

All sales reps now achieve 100% customer coverage, and Sugar reports tell Sandra exactly where each customer is in the sales journey. Missed opportunities are a thing of the past for Kreato.

Today, Kreato’s goal to befriend their clients is made easier with their centralized sales automation tool. Sugar Sell has undoubtedly helped spur Kreato’s growth, and the company plans to continue leveraging the solution in the coming years.

“Without Sugar, we wouldn’t have been able to move forward. If, at some point in the future, the company wants to open another business front or create another product, we know who to call. Sugar has proven itself to be so reliable, and we can adapt it without any problem to the new challenges,” Sandra concludes.