Spiro Improves Customer Communication for Aster Brands

Aster Brands manufactures business opportunities for concrete producers globally. Their business model involves inventing products that they sell locally while also licensing out the technology to other manufacturers across different regions. Expanding to the licensing and distribution model provided Aster Brands substantial growth while also presenting new obstacles in sales, marketing, and customer communication.

Although Aster Brands licenses out the technology to third party manufacturers, they continue to assist each new customer in their region in order to ensure their success. CEO Jake Manthei says, “the biggest part of our company is the customer engagement team. This is a team that does technical project support. We work really hard to make our customers’ phones ring. We have a robust inbound marketing program to generate project level leads and then we have the technical support. We do thousands and thousands of technical support calls where we have a team of civil engineers on staff that will help with that. That grows the market over time.”

The challenge with this model is the amount of communication data necessary to generate thousands of leads across several regions and deliver them to each manufacturer. Before using Spiro, Aster Brands was implementing an ERP and had attempted to run a hacked-together CRM tool using project management software. Some of the issues that arose with that solution included limited communication records, manual data entry, and customers unable to see full value.

It was clear as Aster Brands continued to grow that implementing a proper CRM was necessary. After exploring their options, they chose Spiro. According to Jake, “one of the reasons that we picked Spiro specifically was the AI functionality, because sales people always push back ‘You want me to go do sales or do you want me to do data entry all day?’” With Spiro automatically capturing and logging communications and contact records, the sales and support teams are able to focus on their jobs.

Aster Brands now has much greater visibility into their support team’s activity. According to Matilyn Meadows, Marketing Manager at Aster Brands, “we provide a lot of support to our manufacturers, and the value that we pass on to them is higher than what they see. Using Sprio helps us give the 360 view of the support and value we provide to our customers beyond the leads generated on our website.”