Built for the Road: How Ti-SALES Implemented a CRM Its Outside Sales Team Actually Uses

The Challenge: A Back Office That Worked, and a Sales Team It Couldn’t Reach

Before Node9 came on, Ti-SALES was using Dynamics GP to run its accounting and SalesPad to handle transactions. This system continues to work well for Ti-SALES’ back office; however, there was no system in place for outside sales managers to log and maintain customer records. These territory managers, who Jeff calls the most valuable asset to the company, needed a mobile CRM to input customer data while out in the field, across the United States.

As Node9’s Statement of Work points out, sales, quoting, and order-management processes for Ti-SALES were fragmented and spreadsheet-driven. Manual data entry and duplicated effort were commonplace. Website inquiries were neither automated nor routed, and there were no unified dashboards anywhere.

Put those together and the exposure is specific. A company whose entire model is never losing a municipal account, across a fifteen-year replacement cycle, had no durable record of who it actually knew at each municipality—and an aging workforce whose retirements would carry decades of that knowledge out the door.

Underneath the tooling gap was a data gap. Contacts had retired or moved on with no record of it, and no reliable database tracked any of it. “We were working well with inventory, working well with creating the orders, but the actual account data, customer data, was outdated,” Igor said. “So it was basically starting from scratch with CRM.”

Choosing Zoho and Node9

Ti-SALES ran its own evaluation before any partner entered the picture, sandboxing Zoho against HubSpot and Salesforce. Mobile was not the headline criterion going in—scope, price, and usability were—but the team understood early that it would end up being the tiebreak. “We knew that mobile would be like a deal-breaker,” Jeff said. “If the software didn’t have a strong mobile application, our sales guys wouldn’t use it.” The reasoning traces straight back to who the project was for: “The whole reason to move towards the CRM was for the, the outside team. So our outside sales staff, because that’s where we had the biggest drop-off.”

The ask was intentionally minimal. “We’re not trying to spend hours and hours for them to input all this information into a computer,” Igor said. “We just want them to be able to track how often they’re visiting their accounts.” Dave notes the feature is specific to the CRM mobile app rather than the desktop product—one of a small handful that are—and Igor found that even Zoho users did not know it was there.

Implementation: A Layer, Not a Replacement

Ti-SALES already had a developer who knew SalesPad and had built the Dynamics GP integration; that person kept the data pipeline. “Lou and I set up the CRM,” Dave said, “so custom modules to store all this transactional data that they talk about having in their ERP.” Node9 designed the destination first, then handed the specification to the person who could fill it.

The payoff shows up as an absence of work. “The salespeople don’t even touch the ERP, but the data from that ERP is then available in the CRM,” Dave said. “So they can look on their phone at an account record and they’re like, oh, this order hasn’t shipped yet. They don’t need to log into the ERP to do that.” A rep answering a customer’s question about a shipment does not need to know Dynamics GP exists.

The rest of the build was scaffolding: personalization of the lead-conversion process and sales pipeline based on discovery, up to eight hours of go-live data import covering contacts, accounts, and all six transaction types, the built-in CRM-to-Analytics sync with report security, and a custom end-user video walking the sales process alongside admin and email-plugin training.

Ti-SALES’ SalesPad environment had accumulated hundreds of unique user-defined fields per customer and per inventory item, all of which had to be reconciled against the new CRM schema in partnership with the SalesPad developer. Jeff is aware of what that cost: “we really made their life difficult.” The upside is that the same mapping is why the data is now reachable by departments that never had it.

Adoption: The Hardest Part of the Project

Getting seventeen territory managers to keep a CRM current took more time, and Ti-SALES is candid that it did not happen on its own. The starting position was a blank record and a sales force that had never had one.

Igor’s framing to the team was deliberately modest—not a mandate at first, but an offer. “That’s how I always started the conversation to our outside sales,” he said. “Look, from this point forward, you have a place to put this information.”

The team he was selling it to was split roughly down the middle: half the territory managers had used a CRM at a previous employer, and half had been at Ti-SALES for ten or fifteen years and never had. Igor leaned on the first group to demonstrate the value to the second, and on the quarterly pipeline reviews he and the VP of sales run with each rep to make the benefit visible. “These meetings are getting shorter and shorter,” Igor said, “because you’re not having to remember all this information from just the top of your head or sift through Excel spreadsheets. We’re picking up right where we left off.”

Ti-SALES then backed the cultural work with structure, which is the part most implementations skip. Learning Zoho was written into every sales employee’s quarterly and annual goals and objectives, and CRM use was tied directly to territory managers’ bonus structure. Natural turnover did the rest. “When you have new people coming in, they don’t know anything else,” Jeff said.

That last line is the whole adoption strategy compressed into a sentence: for a commissioned sales force, tying the tool to the paycheck is more persuasive than any training program. The result, per Igor, is that “all of our territory managers” now enter information every day.

CRM in Practice

Outside sales is the heaviest Zoho user group at Ti-SALES, and the account record they maintain is critical to driving revenue and keeping customers. “It starts with our outside sales team—they’re responsible for maintaining all of the customer records, and uploading new opportunities,” Igor said. “All the information is linked to an account. So every other department touches that account at a certain level.”

In the field, a territory manager checks in on a visit with one tap, logs what happened, and pulls up synced ERP data—order status, shipment tracking, invoice history—on a phone, without ever opening Dynamics GP or SalesPad. Behind that, the check-in data drives the visit-frequency reporting Ti-SALES asked Node9 to build once it saw what the button was capable of. That is the mechanism by which a relationship model becomes a system: the cadence a rep commits to is recorded, and the platform notices when it slips.

Ti-SALES also feeds Analytics dashboards back into CRM for outside sales, and uses Zoho Sign heavily for customer agreements—particularly the loaner agreements the support team issues. The company uses Zoho Projects to tie together sales, operations, and finance data, giving each department visibility into where a project stands and what actions to take.

Desk in Practice

Support is Ti-SALES’ second-largest Zoho user group. Calls used to come in, someone wrote them down, and the record went into Basecamp—a project-management tool being used as a call log. “It wasn’t a native ticketing system that you can just email to,” Igor said. “So implementing something like Zoho Desk, where tickets get created and tracked, made support’s life a lot easier. And that’s integrated natively to the account in Zoho CRM, so everything is now connected.”

Node9’s Lou Nolt built the Desk implementation for Ti-SALES’ pump repair department, including a Zoho Form that lets customers submit a repair request directly into the Desk queue, plus “a bunch of automations and notifications.” The native tie to the CRM account is what makes it more than a queue: a territory manager walking into a municipality can see the open support history, and support can see what sales has been working on.

The Retainer Era: What Came After Go-Live

The pattern Node9 sells is an implementation followed by a consulting retainer, and Ti-SALES is the version of that model that works hardest. Asked how long the project took start to finish, Jeff’s first answer was a question: “are you ever finished?” Dave contrasts Ti-SALES directly with clients who buy a retainer and rarely use it: here it “is getting renewed multiple times a year because they have some pretty steady work.”

What that bought Ti-SALES was not maintenance. It was capacity for the wave of requests that arrives the moment a company discovers what a platform can do—and Igor, as the one internal person expected to answer them, is clear about what that would have cost him.

The consequence was that Igor stopped being the bottleneck on purpose. “So I started to pass the baton, where we have department heads actually working directly with them,” he said. “A lot of what Lou is alluding to isn’t even coming through me anymore.” Any department head can now go straight to Dave or Lou with the question Igor rates as the most valuable one: “is there a module that already exists in Zoho that I don’t even know about that we can leverage?”

The retainer work itself is a list of small, specific removals of manual labor. Lou built the Zoho Desk instance and its customer-facing repair form, and took on the Pro Tank Maintenance and Service group’s mail-merge template—“so now with a click of a button, they can get their documents ready and send it out to their customers.”

Beyond that: a steady stream of custom functions and workflows automating the sales process—“Igor is really good at asking for automations from me,” Lou noted—the automated overdue-visit notifications, custom visit-frequency reporting, and an integration to the third-party system Ti-SALES uses for work-order management.