Rocky Ridge Trucks is one of the most prestigious aftermarket automotive modifiers in the United States. They make big, bad trucks by upgrading base models with off-road lifts, unique paint jobs, and interior designs, and have done custom work for Jason Aldean, Kid Rock, Herschel Walker, and many more.
Rocky Ridge has truly mastered the craft of auto personalization and making a quality, innovative vehicle you can trust will be dependable. However, while they’re production line is superb, when Stephen Salstrand started as IT director, he quickly knew their tech situation was anything but.
Before Salstrand became Rocky Ridge’s IT director, the company was using a bring your own device system with its sales team. Because employees were using a mix of Chromebooks, Windows, Macs, and Linux, it was difficult for team members to collaborate and share files, which slowed the team and hampered productivity.
Further, instead of being able to help support sales, the IT department was spending their time doing maintenance on computers and manually running updates. Salstrand knew that by unifying his employees’ operating systems, both the sales team and the IT team would be able to work more efficiently and effectively.
Since Rocky Ridge already used Google Workspace, Chrome devices were an obvious solution. However, Salstrand and his team still researched other options to find a set-and-forget solution that they wouldn’t have to worry about maintaining. In the end, they decided that the cloud-based ChromeOS combined with the capabilities of Chromebooks made going Google the best choice.
Chromebooks would allow the sales teams to collaborate even if they were on the road, would be user-friendly for the less tech-savvy employees, and would be easy for IT to set-up and maintain. Just as importantly, Chrome devices were half to a third of the cost of competitors.
Without Chromebooks, Salstrand says, “We would have had to spend a lot more time cobbling together a solution that would have required a lot more hand-holding, a lot more management of patches, updates, [and] antivirus. That would require us to spend more time on [management] instead of the [work] that drives the sales.”
“We went from the dinosaur days up to 2018 really quick,” said national sales manager Billy Reagin. Reagin worked with Salstrand on deciding to go Google and implementing Chromebooks across the sales team.
While they were deciding where to purchase their Chrome devices, they found Promevo. Salstrand says he knew he needed to find a simple way to buy Chromebooks and their licenses and, “The conclusion I came to was purchasing through Promevo would be the quickest and easiest way to get those rolled out and set up quickly. By the time the devices get to me, all I've got to do is do the enterprise login and it's ready to go.”
Initially, deploying the Chrome devices took under two days, including a half day of training the sales team on how to use their Chromebooks. Now Salstrand estimates it takes under five minutes to get new users added.
“It's five times quicker than any other operating system getting someone set up and going . . . They've already got their passwords, their user credentials, they've already got their bookmarks, they've already got all their sign-ins- it’s DONE.”
While there is an 85% Chrome adoption rate at Rocky Ridge, there have been a few holdouts. Reagin noted that this hasn’t caused any issues because these users can still collaborate via Google Workspace applications, but that the non-Chrome users frequently lose hours of time due to OS and antivirus updates, which Chromebooks run automatically. On the other hand, sales members who use Chromebooks “never stop moving.”
Going Google has made Rocky Ridge more competitive than ever. They recently remodeled their website and had individual employees in charge of quality assurance testing the different web pages. By using Google Workspace, they were able to have a central document listing changes and completed the project in two hours.
While Rocky Ridge originally saw Chromebooks as a unifying collaboration tool, they’ve now incorporated them into their sales strategy. Salespeople use their Chromebooks to show dealers all the different models and packages they offer and can immediately write up proposals and send additional sales material. “Competitiveness comes down to how much time we spend to accomplish a task and our dealers... with Chromebooks, the solution is there.”
Salstrand highly recommends Chromebooks for businesses looking to give their employees the right tech tools: “So many companies have a lot of anxiety about transitioning from a different OS to ChromeOS. You aren't going to lose any [features], and actually, you're going to gain a lot. It's going to be a much smoother user experience that's going to help facilitate focusing on the core of your business, not on having to worry about some sort of hardware/software solution.”
Because Chromebooks are saving Salstrand and his team so much time in terms of set up and maintenance, they’ve been able to investigate how the IT department can use technology to increase sales. They’ve been exploring using Chromebooks in kiosk mode so that customers can design their dream truck in real time.
“Honestly, we would have been limping down the road if we hadn’t started using Chromebooks... Going Google has really helped us save a lot of time from the IT management side, as well as the user adoption side... it's been a really great solution.”
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