Jacobson Companies is a national logistics company that provides a range of services including leasing space in a variety of specialty warehouses across the country. They are uniquely positioned to help clients with a variety of niche logistics needs.
In addition to repositioning their company with a new branding effort (completed by Conrad Philips Vutech) they needed a responsive site to handle the changing way their clients used their website. We spent time with the client’s IT team discussing development options and the unique needs of integrating a variety of software solutions they already had and also wanted to purchase in the near future. We went beyond the public facing side of the site and dug into their current intranet, employee hiring and the needs of the sales team. All these teams had different needs that had to be addressed in the final product.
In short we have saved their sales and marketing team significant time and also provided an easy tool for customers to find information about potential warehouse leasing options across the nation. During early conversations a “simple” map of our locations was mentioned. Fortunately we don’t do “simple” so we had a brainstorming session with the client and created a custom developed interactive map of all their locations. The map loads data directly from their database that syncs with SalesForce.com and is searchable by over 50 unique data fields (only a few are publicly searchable). The map has reduced the calls from customers needing basic information about warehouse information and at the same time produce new interest by showing them all the locations that fit their needs. The marketing team has saved all the time they used to spend creating custom maps for bids and sales presentations by having a special admin only feature where a dynamic high resolution image of the map can be generated in seconds based off a customer’s exact needs.
The final solution is a fully responsive site based on Sitefinity’s CMS platform. Custom data integration with SalesForm.com to pull warehouse data in real time, a custom build out of Google Maps with a dynamic search feature. We also provided access to their existing software portals for employee recruitment. Lastly we integrated HubSpot’s tracking software and blog to provide a way to target potential clients more effectively. Ultimately the project became a huge success.
The custom map which started as a “fun” idea turned out to be the biggest time saver of the project. According to Jacobson staff the sales team drastically reduced the time it took to create a custom sales presentations of locations. Prior to the site a complex process involving the sales, IT, and marketing teams took 2-3 business days to provide an initial capabilities map. After the site was launched the time was reduced to less than 1 hour. That was a time savings of roughly 94%.
