Sunbelt Rentals is the premier rental equipment company in North America. With over 15,000 employees, 975 locations, 35+ years of experience, and a diverse product mix, their competitive advantage is helping customers get the job done. Every individual on the Sunbelt Rentals team makes their customers’ challenges and deadlines their own. Delivering Availability, Reliability, and Ease means that the team relies heavily on the accuracy of their CRM and calendars to fulfill that commitment.
Challenge
Sunbelt Rentals employs a vast sales team that is always on the go – scoping new projects and visiting customer sites. The company uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM to store client data and Microsoft Exchange for calendar and email communications. While their salespeople gathered tons of valuable data about upcoming customer projects and prospective customers each day, surprisingly, these two applications did not speak to each other, and they were often bogged down by information that was trapped in one workflow or the other. They needed a way to get their valuable customer data out of reps’ inboxes and into CRM.
Stale CRM data and inaccurate calendars created double-bookings, missed appointments, billing errors and made it difficult for team members to prioritize their time and map travel. The company needed a secure and scalable solution to give the team access to immediate and up-to-date client data, improve the rental experience for salespeople and customers, and boost sales productivity.
The Sunbelt Rentals team set out to identify a solution that would work reliably in the field and allow their staff to have confidence in their calendar data across applications. Equally important was finding a partner who shares their passion for solving customer challenges, understands their unique and complex business processes, and is there to support them.
Solution
After looking at alternative solutions, Sunbelt Rentals found the perfect partner in Riva –and, ten years later, they are still a happy client!
Riva Sync works with existing workflows to seamlessly connect CRM, email, calendar, contacts, and tasks – eliminating the need for task switching, application toggling, and data entry duplication across platforms. The sales team doesn’t have to take time away from their prospects and customers to learn new applications or processes – Riva makes both work, seamlessly!
Riva’s technical team works closely with Sunbelt Rentals to advance its digital transformation. They keep the Sunbelt Rentals team well-informed throughout their implementation. They provide education on how to optimize Riva to work for their team. “The Riva team is with us every step of the way. We explained our objectives, and Riva handles the rest,” says Susan McLaughlin, CRM Program Manager.
Results
Riva’s intelligent, secure, scalable solution solves Sunbelt Rentals sync challenges. Thousands of field reps across multiple divisions serve their customers better, and Sunbelts Rentals security team rests easy knowing Riva keeps its client data secure. “With many complex moving parts and nuances with each client, we needed a smart sync solution – capable of distinguishing between contacts and leads. We also needed a flexible solution that respects our privacy policies – only syncing certain data and details of the contact, and we found that in Riva,” remarked Susan.
Sunbelt Rentals now has the right technology in place to enable its salespeople. Regardless of whether their customer is an ambitious weekend warrior, a high-end construction company, or a scholastic institution – their commitment to Availability, Reliability, and Ease is achieved with Riva.
The team trusts their CRM and calendar data. While they are busy collecting client data in the field, they know that Riva is working in the background to ensure that data is being shared between applications. No more data blind spots that cause double-booking or missed appointments – and no more duplicate data entry!
Thanks to Riva, the Sunbelt Rentals team now has smarter client exchanges. Their data is now transparent and immediate, allowing the team to build deeper relationships in less time with increased efficiency and productivity. Susan shared, “We estimate a savings of 15-20 minutes a day for each field rep. Over ten years, that equates to hundreds of thousands of dollars – well worth our investment in Riva!”
Having a complete view of customer data is especially important for Sunbelts Rentals B2B clients. To help select the right equipment, the field team must know on the spot how long they’ve been a client, what equipment they’ve previously rented, if there was special pricing in place, or if they were a franchise that had to comply with equipment selections supported by the head office. Riva makes this all possible.
“Riva is our partner. We do not think of Riva as a vendor; they are truly a partner in our business,” says Susan.
Riva helps Sunbelt Rentals better serve their customers by:
- Improving visibility and insights – seamlessly syncing Microsoft Dynamics CRM contacts, task, and calendar appointments.
- Delivering a 360-degree view of customers and their history with the company to manage relationship data – including current and past projects, rental history, special pricing, and contract details.
- Supporting how Sunbelt Rentals does business – from respecting workflows to automatically sharing data based on rules and access levels defined by the company.
- Accelerating efficiency and productivity – keeping important customer information from being trapped in CRM, calendar, or email data stores.
- Scaling with ease – to meet the specific needs of Sunbelts’ business as it continues to evolve and grow.
With Riva in place, Sunbelt Rentals can now trust its CRM data. Their field staff can avoid awkward moments with customers and instead spend their time building relationships and the business. Sunbelt Rentals has enabled its field sales team to execute with ease – creating a memorable customer experience and increasing loyalty.
