Case study. How Champion Power Equipment work smarter, not harder

Transcription

1 Case study How Champion Power Equipment work smarter, not harder

2 Case Study : Champion Power Equipment 2 Company: Champion Power Equipment Founded: 2003 Website: Industry: Outdoor Power Equipment Head Office: Santa Fe Springs, California # of Employees: # of Plytix users: 4 How long have you been using Plytix?: 1 year About Champion Power Equipment Champion Power Equipment was founded in 2003 by its 3 partners. In the power equipment market, specifically portable generators, there was opportunity to introduce a lower cost, higher value product, along with a 1st class level of customer service. This is right where Champion sought to establish itself as a brand. The business now has offices in California, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and Toronto. The company s mission and vision are to remain as nimble as possible - Plytix has helped them achieve this.

3 Case Study : Champion Power Equipment 3 Product Marketing at Champion Power Equipment - with Marketing Director, Scott Henning There are four people in my department, and the marketing is traditional and digital - we use creative services, trade show management, brand management, sales support, etc. My favorite thing about my job is its flexibility, and of course, the culture! Our culture is Familial - everyone has an open door policy. We also all wear many hats, so there is a lot of collaboration and fluid job responsibilities. Image credit: Champion Power Equipment website Life Before Plytix It was a mess. We used Word files for marketing copy, Excel files for product specs, PDFs, etc. Nothing was stored in the cloud, and things were updated often but there was no established Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for this. So if you weren t notified of an update, or you pulled up what you thought was the most recent on the matter, you could never really know if you had the most accurate content. It caused 3 major issues. First, no established SOP for the product and marketing teams creates an undue burden. It was always a scramble when something needed to be update in trying to track down the latest source file, the most recent . Second, it created a lot of noise and confusion for the sales team - countless update s. Third, because of the noise, confusion and scrambling we had a low level of content accuracy and consistency.

4 Case Study : Champion Power Equipment 4 Life After Plytix We ve organized our information structure within each product into groups - marketing, category specs, sales info, regulatory info, dimensions, etc. We use some feeds for internal needs - generating full product listings with key information such as hazardous materials, or feature benefits. We also use other feeds for 3rd party services like Google Manufacturer Center, Channel Advisor, etc. and hope to use more with complimentary services in the future, like Venzee, which handles data manipulation and processing into specific retailer formats. We use catalogs for our self serve needs - mostly sales reps. We have catalogs divided by retailer mostly. Plytix gives us one source of truth. We ve been able to send out one link to bookmark (for one of our catalogs) and our sales team and sales reps now know they have a single place to access information. No more back and forth via , no more hundreds of links, no more confusion. It s allowed us to grow our capabilities without having to grow our team size - this keeps us nimble and flexible as mentioned earlier. Now that we use Plytix, Internal to the marketing department we just seek to ensure all content and assets are up to date. I am also looking into using it more fully in generator product feeds that could perhaps at one point be imported automatically to our brand site or other retailer sites eliminating some of the manual data entry required. Plytix allows us to set it and forget it so to speak. We just make sure our content and assets are up to date and then we are hands off with the sales team. We get 3rd party reports from our retailers on content quality. We ve been able to use these scores along with Plytix s completeness attribute types to more quickly upgrade our content. As a leader and manager, it gives me a foundation to create SOPs around. In order to stay nimble we need to have

5 Case Study : Champion Power Equipment 5 outlined processes. This helps avoid unneeded questions, distractions, etc. Plytix has single handedly reduced the amount of time spent on managing, organizing, and distributing content. Since we don t track task hours internally I can only provide an educated guess but I d say it s cut our time spent in half all while dramatically increasing content accuracy. Intuitive product content management My favorite part about using Plytix? It s intuitive. I love that it s growing and I get excited when I get the update s. It s one of my favorite tools (I may have low-level OCD when it comes to organizing information so this has been a blessing). Our goal for the future is to make our content distribution as automated as possible. If you had to define Plytix in a few words, what would it be? Intuitive product content management.

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