How PowerZone Uses IDEAL and it’s Add-Ons to Maximize Every Opportunity

Since opening their doors in 1993, PowerZone has built a reputation in Christiansburg, Virginia, for providing high-quality outdoor power equipment and unbeatable customer service. As a family-owned dealership serving residential and commercial customers alike, their commitment to trust, friendliness, and quality products, have always been most important.

With the help of IDEAL, PowerZone has taken their operations to the next level—streamlining sales tracking, improving internal visibility, and automating time-consuming tasks.

Additionally, TargetCRM has transformed how the team communicates with customers, and with TargetPay, the checkout process has become faster and more efficient, cutting costs while enhancing the customer experience.

We sat down with Rick Wilz from PowerZone, to hear all about the benefits and improvements IDEAL and it’s add-ons have provided their dealership, leading to growing and thriving business.

How has IDEAL changed your life?

Rick: Quite honestly, I am with PowerZone because of IDEAL. Jim brought it in to solve some immediate problems that he had. Once he saw the wealth of opportunity that existed, he knew that he needed someone to help put the time in to get all the benefits out of the platform. I then personally shifted jobs because of talking to Jim and seeing the opportunities that existed with his expanded platforming capabilities, and how we can start to get them into production quicker and fully maximize the benefits.

What have you liked most about IDEAL?

Rick: What I really love is the degree to which all of the key stakeholders in the company really want to understand how to improve our business. They’re not just looking to push new modules to us; they’re looking to solve our problems.

What departments have got the most benefit from IDEAL and how?

Rick: One of the things that it has helped us to do is, on the sales side, is to be able to tell our salespeople at a point in time exactly how much commission they’ve earned month to date, year to date, all of that sort of stuff. So the amount of information that we can get out of there has been very helpful.

What would you say to someone who is considering IDEAL?

Rick: The first thing I would say to them is to call us at the PowerZone, because just as other dealers have been helpful to us, we would be very helpful and eager to talk to them about the benefits that we’ve seen.

I would also say to ask for testimonials and referrals to other clients, because a lot of these folks come from a dealer network, or a dealer background. I’m sure that they can get connected with another dealer that’s been through a similar experience, and that would be the right people to talk to.

What has Target CRM done for your customer communication?

Rick: We had been using SMS to communicate with our customers for a long period of time, but what we really gained with TargetCRM was the level of automation and integration with the core platform.

Now when we switch the status to ready for customer pickup, we don’t have to send the text. It was great that we could sit down at a desktop and type that in, but now we don’t do that stuff. It happens automatically.

How has the customer experience improved from their side with Target Pay?

Rick: It has shortened the amount of time that it takes us to check a customer out, quite frankly. It’s a cost saving effort for us, and a satisfaction improvement for the customers.