MCKINLEY EQUIPMENT CORPORATION

My entire company is on Salesforce. I can do what the big boys do, but I can do it better because I’m faster.”

KEVIN RUSIN, CFO AT MCKINLEY EQUIPMENT CORPORATION
 

McKinley Equipment is built on trust and powered by Salesforce.

“Being the Most Trusted at What We Do” is more than a slogan to McKinley Equipment, it goes to the very heart of its business. From its earliest days, former Marine and founder Bill McKinley built a reputation for being an honest, trustworthy business partner. Today, Bill’s son Mike McKinley embraces those same values as he leads the family-owned company. After his tour of duty during World War II, Bill McKinley moved to Ohio to his uncle’s forklift business. After learning the family trade, Bill moved to California in 1948 to found McKinley Equipment, a distributor of material handling equipment. Since then, the company has grown across the Western United States and spun off a sister company, McKinley Elevator. Today, the two businesses share in the mission of being the most trusted brand in their space. In 2011, when the McKinley companies employed roughly 100 people, CFO Kevin Rusin made the call to adopt Salesforce. By his count, McKinley had nine silos of data and each employee worked inside of his own laptop and email account without much visibility into teammates’ work. “There was no pipeline — it was total blindness,” Rusin said. Rusin wanted a platform into which data could be entered once and shared across the organization. He wanted his employees working collaboratively and efficiently. “At the end of the day, the choice was really easy to make — Salesforce,” he said.

 

We’re a service company. Everything we sell has to be installed and maintained to maximize uptime and asset life. Salesforce gives us the ability to manage the process.”

KEVIN RUSIN, CFO AT MCKINLEY EQUIPMENT CORPORATION

A family business built on trust, service, and Salesforce Platform

As of 2015, nearly all of McKinley’s 120 employees use the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. Instead of operating in blind silos, sales teams can now work a lead, convert it to an opportunity, and generate a customer quote within a single system. Once an order is placed, a project manager can then pick up the phone — or an email can be automatically generated and sent — thanking the customer and detailing next steps in the installation process. And if a customer hands a field agent a payment check, he can deposit it by snapping a photo and sending it electronically to the bank. “A copy of the check also gets logged into our system by Sales Cloud,” Rusin explained. “Then the project manager knows it’s full steam ahead because we’ve been paid.” McKinley Equipment’s customers trust them to not only sell, but also maintain mission-critical equipment. The company leverages AppExchange and Salesforce Platform to run its service business. A Salesforce AppExchange app for field service management called ServiceMax was a vital addition to empower McKinley Equipment reps to do more business while out on a site visit. When the company ran on paper, they couldn’t track any additional work a customer may have needed beyond the work order. With ServiceMax, tracking additional work in the field is easy. Rusin said McKinley has done an additional $1.4 million worth of additional on-site work since adopting the system. That represents a 42% increase in work order throughout per customer service rep. ServiceMax also lets McKinley Equipment leverage account histories to match the correct technician to a job based on what make and model of equipment a customer has. That process has increased efficiencies within the company. In turn, customer satisfaction has been on the rise, as well. The company also developed Utilization Rate (UR), a custom app for its service business built on Salesforce Platform. UR, a measurement of technician efficiency, allows technicians and their managers to constantly work on improving UR ratios, and McKinley uses it as a gamification tool, driving friendly competition among technicians to achieve top performer status. “My entire company is on Salesforce Platform,” Rusin said. “I can do what the big boys do, but I can do it better because I’m faster. Salesforce allows me to do everything I want to do.”

Exploring the future of service with the Internet of Things

McKinley Equipment continues to explore new areas of growth, as befits its company legacy. The company is launching a pilot program around the Internet of Things, tying select McKinley-serviced equipment back to ServiceMax. At the end of the day, the people at McKinley Equipment wear a lot of hats, but their business revolves around building and maintaining customer trust through great products and awesome service. “We’re a service company,” Rusin said. “Everything we sell has to be installed and has to be maintained to maximize uptime and asset life. Salesforce gives us the ability to manage the process.”

 

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