As a kid growing up on the farm, I knew the difference between good quality tools and cheap imitations. Farm equipment was very unforgiving to tools, so the cheap imitations wouldn’t last long. Fast-forward to being an adult living in a suburb of Minneapolis, and I quickly became a fan of Northern Tool + Equipment (NT+E), which was based about 10 miles from where I lived. Their products were very good quality, and although I wasn’t changing the shanks on a chisel plow anymore, it was still nice to use tools around the house that were solid and reliable. So when I was given the opportunity to participate in a webinar with David Hildebrandt, the Database Marketing Manager for NT+E, it brought back some nice memories from my past.

Not only do they make good tools, NT+E is also very good at marketing – and I’m very happy that SAS can be a part of their success. About 5 years ago, NT+E implemented SAS Marketing Automation. This was a big decision for this relatively small, conservative company considering they would have to develop the capabilities in-house, but they made the leap away from using an external service bureau for marketing services to doing it on their own. Well, from more sophisticated campaigns to better predictive modeling, the improved performance results were almost immediate. According to David , “The whole process was better, faster, and cheaper than we imagined. The time needed to create mailing campaigns was drastically reduced. What used to take the service bureau weeks to do now only takes us a couple of days.”

There are several additional comments that could summarize their results, but I think the one from Chuck Albrecht, their president, says it the best, “Our credo has always been: ‘the right tool for the right job.’ SAS Marketing Automation is exactly the right tool we needed to grow our business.”

Check out more of the Northern Tool + Equipment story in the paper: Capturing Customer Value in a Multichannel World (pdf).