How Extruflex achieved double-digit sales growth with Pipedrive CRM
Established in 1962, Extruflex manufactures flexible PVC products for industrial doors, temperature control, workplace separation, welding protection and other specialized applications. Its customers range from food and logistics businesses to tent and marquee manufacturers.
“We engineer flexible PVC materials that shape safer, cleaner and more efficient environments worldwide. Our strength is the combination of manufacturing expertise, a broad product range, international production capabilities and local commercial support for customers in more than 80 countries.” – Shane Solomon, Global Sales & Marketing Director, Extruflex Group
- Industry: Industrial manufacturing
- Location: International
- Key features/add-ons: Activity management, customizable pipelines and fields, Automations, Insights, Integrations, Campaigns
80+ countries
With customers supported by Extruflex
Double-digit growth
Achieved with Pipedrive supporting the sales process
35
Pipedrive seats
Why Extruflex needed greater transparency across the business
Selling, distributing and marketing different products to numerous industries in dozens of countries is about as complex as a sales operation can get. This is the daily reality for Extruflex, which launched in Europe more than 60 years ago and has since become a multinational enterprise.
The technical nature of Extruflex’s products also means there’s no standard sales cycle. Some customers know what they need and can buy relatively quickly; others require months of product education, technical evaluation and testing before a deal can progress.
The company’s challenge has increasingly been not just managing a huge sales network but also making sense of it. So, in 2024, they went in search of a tech solution that could turn scattered data and disparate ways of working into a more coherent and manageable system.
Before Pipedrive, individual sales offices relied on their own systems for tracking prospects and customers. With no single source of information, managers struggled to understand the true status of opportunities and work out what to prioritize.
Global Sales & Marketing Director Shane Solomon says Pipedrive CRM stood out among competitors for its “clear focus on practical sales management, which immediately caught our attention.” Extruflex now has 35 users spanning different countries, offices and commercial roles.
Shane SolomonGlobal Sales & Marketing Director, Extruflex Group
How Pipedrive brings structure and flexibility to a challenging setup
Thanks to Pipedrive CRM, Extruflex sales teams now have full confidence in their process, regardless of how long or complicated a sale becomes. Activity management is instrumental in this: calls, emails and meetings sit in the CRM alongside customer visits, quotations, samples and product tests, with each live prospect assigned a next step, an owner and a target date.
Crucially, while Pipedrive provides a robust structure, it doesn’t impose rigidity. Customizable pipelines and fields give Extruflex the flexibility to adapt the CRM to how its customers buy, with stages covering qualification, discussion, testing or quotation, negotiation and conversion. Custom fields add context including region, industry, product or application, lead source and commercial priority.
This represents a marked change from the old reliance on spreadsheets, one-to-one updates and each salesperson’s own organizational habits. Managers can quickly spot neglected business, while Automations reduce routine admin by triggering activities according to customer profile.
Lead management brings prospects from various sources into a reliable process. Website inquiries, trade shows, referrals, existing customers and distributors, outbound prospecting and market development all feed the Leads Inbox, where they’re routed to the relevant salesperson or region and assessed before progressing to the deal pipeline.
The CRM’s work doesn’t stop when a prospect becomes a customer. Extruflex also uses it to manage existing distributors and customers, schedule regular contact and identify potential sales of other products.
Shane SolomonGlobal Sales & Marketing Director, Extruflex Group
Specific Pipedrive features and how they’re used
Here are the key Pipedrive functionalities adopted by Extruflex:
How Extruflex is expanding confidently with Pipedrive
For a business the size of Extruflex, growth carries an implicit worry: every new market, product and customer adds yet another layer of complexity. But Pipedrive is helping Extruflex make expansion an opportunity rather than a source of stress. Instead of becoming harder to manage as sales increase, the growing volume of information becomes an asset.
This approach already appears to be paying off. Since implementing Pipedrive, Extruflex has recorded double-digit sales growth without making its commercial operation harder to manage.
Managers no longer have to rely so heavily on individual salespeople to piece together what’s going on. By comparing activity across geographies, they can identify priorities and build a clearer picture of where future business might come from. That oversight becomes particularly valuable when opportunities can take months to develop, involving technical evaluation, samples, testing and quotations along the way – often with multiple decision-makers involved.
Shane SolomonGlobal Sales & Marketing Director, Extruflex Group
Final thoughts
For Shane Solomon, this experience has shown that an effective CRM starts with how a company sells rather than the software. His advice to other industrial manufacturers is to define a simple, realistic process based on how their customers actually buy.
“Make next activities mandatory, establish clear data standards and use the CRM consistently as a management tool, rather than treating it only as a database,” he says.