The Safford Equipment Story: A Locally Owned Business in Rural Alabama

Safford Equipment is a rural Alabama outdoor power equipment business. It supplies customers across the southeast with a wide range of lawn equipment: mowers, tillers, leaf blowers, chainsaws, trimmers, and even trailers to haul it all. At the heart of that business is founder and owner Keith Bridges. Keith started Safford in his early twenties, in a small community of fewer than 1,000 people that had little more than a post office. Through dedication, innovation, and customer-service-driven focus, Keith has built one of the region’s fastest-growing businesses.  Safford is a business where customers from the surrounding states of Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee don’t mind driving five hours one way to purchase their lawn equipment.

Manual Processes Make Lead Conversion Burdensome and Ineffective

For years, Safford relied on manual processes to follow up on social media marketing and website marketing leads. However, as Safford’s business grew, so did the volume of interest in their products. Manually processing high volumes of leads developed inefficiencies as well as gaps in identifying and converting qualified leads. As a result, the Safford team found themselves spending countless hours following up on leads that didn’t result in sales. Safford’s team knew there had to be a better way and turned to el LinKe for help.

Holistic Audit Identifies Marketing to Sales Gaps, Simplifies Financing & Online Sales Processes, and Generates Increased Revenue

El LinKe conducted a gap analysis of Safford’s lead to sales cycle, tracking the customer’s path from the point of interest through the entire sales funnel. The audit revealed that many clients hit a roadblock when it came to financing the purchase of one of Safford’s renowned bundle deals.

Throughout the southeast region, Safford is renowned for selling equipment bundles: a mower, blower, chainsaw, trimmer, and trailer package. Purchased together, equipment bundles save the average customer around 10%. However, as most of these equipment bundles run several thousand dollars, and as high as $18,000, most need to be financed. To get financed, customers had to approach banks outside of Safford to find funding solutions. Credit scores and the equipment purchased affected which banks would offer a loan. This led to customers approaching several banks and getting multiple declined offers. Frustrated with the difficulty and time it took to find the necessary funding, many customers exited the sales funnel.

In response, el LinKe developed a simple tool to help the client navigate the challenging financing process. Now, customers have a seamless, one-step process for submitting financing applications. This streamlined process not only has reduced customer approval waiting times, but it has helped Safford more efficiently handle the large volumes of financing requests. The result has skyrocketed Safford’s sales. January 2021’s sales were up 92% from the same month in 2020. Additionally, Safford has become the number one dealer for Gravely and Husqvarna in the Southeast.

Automated Tools and Remote Teams Further Streamline Lead to Sale Process

As Safford’s business grows, so does its customer base. El LinKe’s audit also found that the manual lead-to-sale process Safford was using made it time-consuming and inefficient for the team to respond to all inbound customer questions. As with all brick-and-mortar stores, in-store salespeople are constrained by time and physical store space, limiting how many people they can serve per hour and per day. Under these limitations, the in-store team couldn’t increase conversations with online customers without also significantly increasing their team size to address both online and in-store customers. To streamline the lead-to-sale process and optimize the customer experience, el LinKe developed a robust online messaging system and put together a remote customer service team.

With streamlined lead-to-sale tools in place, Safford now has a more efficient way to respond to queries and qualify and nurture leads through the sales funnel. More importantly, Safford’s improved lead-to-sale process has simplified and sped up the purchase process for the customer. Customers have also been positively commenting on the online support they receive:

Powerful Solutions, Increased Customer Satisfaction

el LinKe and Safford have worked hard to ensure that every solution is set up to improve the customer experience and reduce the burden on in-house staff. The remote team is set up to pivot quickly when needed and provide a seamless experience for the customer due to streamlined communication. Safford doesn’t miss a beat, even amid supply chain disruptions and peaks in demand. The team is quick, flexible, and efficient no matter the situation.