Nelbud Services Group Grows by 500 Basis Points with Help from BT Partners and Domo

“Nelbud has always taken a progressive and modern approach to scaling our business,” explains Michael Crafton, CEO of Nelbud. “As a result, we outpaced the technology available to our industry. We needed access to data that could help us make real-time decisions. We need to think about what’s happening now and predict what will happen tomorrow — otherwise, it’s too late to make a difference.”

Nearly a decade ago, the company implemented NetSuite and Service Trade. Crafton recalls that while the cost of the applications was more than he thought the company could spend at the time, he realized that to scale the business, they’d need the financial and operational platform to support that growth. “We embraced NetSuite and Service Trade and put them to work for us,” says Crafton. “While they provide good reporting and analytics, we needed a better tool — a Business Intelligence tool that could bring together disparate data from all our business applications.”

BT Partners is able to capture the data from more than two dozen software systems, feeding millions of rows of data into the Domo BI tool and making the data available for deep analysis.

“Before, we couldn’t analyze our financial and operational data efficiently — we couldn’t see it in context of the entire operation,” Crafton says. “BT Partners built the dashboards in Domo that allow us to visualize the inner workings of our organization and see how they all relate. We can see how marketing spend affects sales, how changes in service routing affect payroll, and which services yield the most profits. This is decision-making data at its finest. We are making smart, strategic, and informed decisions that directly impact our bottom line. Since we started using BT Partners and Domo, our overall margins are up by 500 basis points.”

One dashboard BT Partners built in the Domo BI tool helped Nelbud discover that customer retention was higher when a customer spent more than $10,000 annually. Further, the analysis uncovered that the customer acquisition costs were similar, regardless of the annual spend. Armed with this information, the company worked to incentivize its sales team to help build these accounts. When the analysis provided indicators that a customer may not be renewing, Nelbud asked its customer service personnel to prioritize relationship building with that client.

“It worked!” says Crafton. “In the first year, we converted an additional 30% of our customers into over $10,000 spenders. It wasn’t simply about selling them more things, either. It was by increasing our touchpoints, informing them of services they might not be aware of. With the information BT Partners and the Domo BI tool provided, we built our sales and built stronger customer relationships.”

Another analysis BT Partners built allowed Nelbud to increase the margins it makes on its service calls. “We found that our margin drops if a three-person crew drives more than 50 miles,” Crafton explains. “So, we tweaked our schedule, and as a result, we’ve dramatically increased profitability and productivity. Our teams can handle more calls, putting more money in their pockets, while shorter commutes create a better work-life balance. Without changing our pricing, our margins jumped three percentage points.”

Crafton concludes, “We chose a best-in-class solution for each department in the company. Each application was carefully selected to allow each business area to do its best work. This model works because Domo ties them all together and BT Partners build the windows into the data that show us the big picture. BT Partners teaches me new things all the time — they reach into our applications and pull out answers. Sometimes those answers are to questions we didn’t know needed to be asked.”