Customer Spotlight: Aquarius Supply

Periodically, we like to shine the spotlight on our great customer partners – giving them the chance to offer insights about why the company chose SMP, how the company is benefiting from SMP and more.

This month, we’re profiling Aquarius Supply headquartered in Hawthorne, New Jersey. In 1969 the original founding father started the company by selling irrigation pipe out of his garage. Over the next 46 years, the company diversified its product base and offerings to include: landscape lighting, pond supplies, organic turf products and turf supplies, porous pavement products, and storm water management. Aquarius Supply has grown to 48 employees and 11 branches located in New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Virginia. To this day, the company remains family owned and operated.

Mark Harabedian, Vice President, played a pivotal role in the implementation process and offered some great insights in a recent interview about the company’s implementation of Sales Management Plus.

What were Aquarius Supply’s main objectives in implementing Sales Management Plus?

Our main objectives were to put more customer knowledge in the hands of our sales force to strengthen relationships, streamline reporting and activity logging by our sales team and segment our customer base by using profiling fields for target-marketing initiatives.

Why did Aquarius Supply choose SMP as their Sales Management and CRM partner?

From 2006 – 2009, we subscribed to SMP but had a very linear view of the utility as solely for sales reporting. Several years later, when we switched to a new ERP system, we revisited various CRMs. We were experiencing drawbacks within the ERP system regarding customer contact management and sales reporting. We immediately thought of SMP and its ease of use. We knew that SMP had the features and tracking mechanisms we needed. Having the tables already created by our ERP and the fact that we were familiar with the SMP file layouts, would significantly speed up the implementation process. Lastly, the price point for SMP hit us in the right spot compared to the others we had been researching.

What was your experience like during the implementation process and there after?

The implementation process was extremely easy with excellent support provided along the way. The most challenging and time consuming part was developing the product categories that made sense for our business. After the implementation, the support team provided excellent training and on-going support as needed. Even today, when we identify a bug or request an enhancement, SMP proactively incorporates all requests into an upcoming release. Working with a smaller company such as SMP has allowed us to be part of their team and make the product better together. 

What is your Corporate Mission as it relates to using a CRM & business challenges?

Part of our business mission is to develop ways to help customers save time, cut costs and increase efficiency. A diversified product offering enabled the use of target marketing email campaigns to specific customer segments. We compete with companies like John Deere, landscape companies, other various larger supply houses, and most recently Amazon. People can now buy sprinkler heads online, so we’re always trying to introduce a new product or remind our customers of an existing product on the market that will save them time or money. We are having great success with our email campaigns and our open rates have been significantly higher with targeted campaigns.