Introducing Northern Safety & Industrial (NSI)
Northern Safety & Industrial (NSI) is an industrial distributor. The company got its start focusing only on safety equipment such as gloves, glasses, hard hats, and general Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Over the past 40 years, they have expanded to selling all industrial products to a multitude of different industries. They sell everything from safety glasses and gloves to everyday items like adhesives, abrasives, tools, tapes, and other general industrial items. Recently, a huge company focus has been on Covid tests and masks.
We sat down to talk with Jeff Patridge, Central Region Sales Manager at Northern Safety & Industrial. His team “is tasked with finding new clients and growing business, and pushing what our core businesses and solutions and products are across the central region of the United States.”
Patridge is also responsible for training all new employees from a sales perspective on SalesIntel and other prospecting platforms used by the company.
Shifting Targets During Covid with SalesIntel
The Covid pandemic caused a major shift in the clients Patridge could sell to. Usual customers were slowing their operations due to unprecedented restrictions, and healthcare companies had their supply chain broken overnight.
“Pre COVID, we didn’t sell to hospitals or nursing homes or dentist offices,” Patridge said. “SalesIntel helped us navigate the complex organizational chart of a hospital. Just imagine trying to make a cold call to a hospital right now. Where would you even begin?”
The immediate benefits of SalesIntel were also clear compared to competitors. SalesIntel helped Patridge try exploring contacts in any industry instead of their standards without any extra charges. Experimenting with healthcare clients wouldn’t have been possible without the ease provided by SalesIntel.
“People talk about ZoomInfo, your competitor. It’s not a competition to me. It’s just not. It’s too different. This information is faster, more accurate, more reliable. It’s incredible. I don’t know why you wouldn’t use it if you had access to it. Anyone I show this to that has experience with your competition takes about 5 minutes to see how much better SalesIntel is.”
Easy to Learn and Easy to Teach
NSI’s Sales Operation Division purchased SalesIntel and then rolled the technology out to the salespeople internally.
“The second we learned what it was and we had our aha moment, it was like, ‘Yes, we’re going to use this every single day.’”
The intuitive and straightforward nature of the app made it quick to pick up and can easily be taught to new employees.
“I feel like [SalesIntel] is easy enough, you could figure it out in about 15 minutes, the basics, the A and B. I think it’s remarkable. I could teach it to anybody in about 15 minutes. It’s not intimidating.”
Over $500,000 in Immediate Results with SalesIntel
SaleIntel immediately made itself useful to Patridge’s team.
“We were looking for people that were buying masks, sanitizers, all that stuff during the height of COVID. We found, a company called a Symphony Network. We ran our search, found the contact and we emailed him right off of SalesIntel,” Patridge said.
“That contact bought some stuff and gave us five referrals all in the healthcare field. All five of those referrals have been $100,000 or more clients. That is 100% traceable to SalesIntel. In fact across our region to date, I can attribute well over $1,000,000 in sales to using SalesIntel to find prospects and contact info we never would have found on our own.”
SalesIntel also provides RevDriver, a tool to access SalesIntel contact data while on social media, LinkedIn, or company websites. Both tools continue to help get meetings quickly and efficiently.
“Last week, a construction company in Chicago had made a LinkedIn post. One of my guys in Chicago followed it and he saw the person who had just become the safety manager of this company. He looked up the guy’s information on RevDriver. He just went to the company’s website, pulled down RevDriver, saw a safety manager, got his cell phone number, called him, and scheduled a meeting this week.”
Patridge couldn’t imagine the time it would take to use antiquated sales methods, walk into an office building, and find a decision-maker. But he can look up any company on RevDriver or SalesIntel, find a decision-maker, and call them in “less than two minutes.”
Finding Clients with Intent Data
Patridge and his team also use Buyer Intent data provided SalesIntel. Users can pick from 9,000 Intent topics which are actively monitored to learn what prospects are interested in before users reach out to them.
“I use Intent data for anyone looking for respirators,” Patridge said. “We’ve been in a pandemic for two years, so what we do is we run the respirator intent search. We found out that a university was 90% surging on respirators. We called the safety department said, ‘Hey, do you use respirators?’ They replied, ‘Oh my gosh, I was just searching that.’”
Patridge later closed a deal for respirators at the university. He wouldn’t have known about this opportunity without SalesIntel’s intent data.
Essential SalesIntel Adoption and Growth
SalesIntel has helped Patridge’s team always hit their sales goals since they started using the tool and is a key part of training for new hires. There has been a clear delta between sales reps who actively use SalesIntel and those who don’t.
“Our most successful salespeople across the company are ones using SalesIntel. 100% of the data supports it.”
When new employees begin at NSI, they’re immediately impressed with the tool and, even without ever having access to a similar one, can start using it right away.
“[Sales Rep A] is brand new. Last month, he ran 2,108 searches and spent 401 minutes in the app. That’s an incredible amount of time. That tells me that someone that’s been in the industry, but never had access to SalesIntel thinks it’s as great as I do. Because, he can quickly search for whatever it is he’s looking for, and it’s been invaluable for our company during COVID.”
Patridge struggled to imagine how the past two years would have gone without SalesIntel.
“I have 100% certainty we wouldn’t hit our goals without SalesIntel because we are in a depressed industry. And, what I mean by depressed industry is for two years businesses have been shut down and people haven’t been able to work. To be flexible in our organization and shift our demographic of who we’ve been able to chase, we needed something that was going to give us access to contacts that we never chased before. SalesIntel has done that for us.”
Bringing It All Together
The Covid pandemic forced NSI to readjust their target markets and their approach to sales as regular customers were no longer buying products in their regular quantities. Yet, despite all of this they were able to still succeed and grow. With the help of SalesIntel, Patridge and his team were able to target new markets, rapidly train new hires, and continue to hit their goals unimpeded. Their success would not have been possible without the speed, scope, and accuracy of SalesIntel’s company and contact data.
