Case Study: CRM For Manufacturing And Retail Industry
As the largest private-label tea packing company in North America, the manufacturer produces 28 million tea bags daily at three facilities in California, Georgia and New Jersey. Its brewing tea, coffee and cold brews have graced millions of shelves and countertops for more than 150 years. What you may not know is just how hard the business has worked to get to its current levels of distribution.
Company
Tetley Harris
Industry
F&B Manufacturer & Retailer
Location
Greenford, United Kingdom
Sugar CRM allowed us to not only increase the number of accounts we were keeping track of, but also to maximize the amount of opportunities we go through
Challenges Encountered by Tetley Harris
For many years, the Tetley Harris sales team relied solely on spreadsheets.
While this solution worked well for awhile, there came a point when the system was doing more harm than good, particularly when it came to monitoring leads and tracking opportunities. Although the company had targeted approximately 100 customers, the team wasn’t really engaging with them or actively selling to them efficiently.
As Trevor McSwain – Regional Sales Manager, tells:
“We had a pretty sorry, almost pathetic, process with 10 to 12 opportunities that would get worked throughout the year. Everybody was swinging for the home run.”
To be fair: These were all “big” wins, so it made a lot of sense to stay laser-focused on a small number of accounts. The issue, however, was that it became incredibly difficult to go after those $50,000 and $5 million-a-year customers and keep everything organized. And a lot of smaller, but high potential, prospects weren’t even making the spreadsheets.
In setting out to find a better solution, McSwain’s goal was simple:
Give Sales a platform that will free them to spend less time managing and more time interacting.
CRM for Manufacturing and Retail Industry: How it helps?

Goal Set
Improve pipeline, manage leads and classify different types of customers
- Increase the number of opportunities Sales is actively pursuing
- Keep better track of those opportunities
- Improve the accuracy of the customer database

Solution
Flexible, intuitive and easy to use
- They reached out to SugarCRM’s Elite partner to better understand the tool and get a closer look. It ended up being one of the best decisions in this entire process.
- Sugar was the only solution that allowed them to check every box on the checklist of needs.

Result
From 100 To 1,200+ Active Accounts
- The team went from 100 active leads to more than 1,200 accounts that reps are either targeting or currently engaged with.
- Shortly after implementing Sugar with BrainSell’s help, they opened and closed 400 opportunities—far more than they had ever worked through before.