How Convex Is Helping Perfection Group Reach $100+ Million in Annual Revenue

Creating a More Perfect Sales Motion 

Headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, Perfection Group designs, builds and services mechanical  systems that create healthy and comfortable environments. Perfection Group currently operates in five states with regional operations and management. Family-owned since 1951, they offer services that cover all life cycles of a facility including design-build, service and maintenance, energy conservation and total facility management.

Selling within these four key business categories keeps Perfection’s sales team busy, so efficiencies are paramount—but difficult to find with traditional go-to-market approaches. 

Vice President of Business Development Alec Blaine spent years selling preventive maintenance contracts for Perfection but has since moved to corporate business development and marketing, targeting accounts in Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and north Georgia. At one time, his prospecting process consisted of mining manufacturers’ print directories for information and the PARLAY data layer of Google Earth. This overlapping view shows building tax records with ownership information, but nothing else. These approaches, along with LinkedIn searches and a bare-bones CRM, were his day-to-day prospecting tools.

Business Development Representative Chris Wood’s experience was similar. Covering East Tennessee, his job is to find new prospects and get in front of them in any way possible. “We had access to zip codes, area codes, and building square footage,” he says. “But you’d have to go to Google Earth, find the address, determine if it was even worth looking at, then go to the prospect’s website, find a phone number, and start dialing. It was pretty inconvenient.” 

Alec first learned about Atlas in January 2020—and the team was won over by the intuitive, map-based application that helps sales teams find new opportunities within their territory and develop the most effective strategy to capture them.

“At first, our owners were concerned about the expense,” Alec explains, “but once we backed out and looked at the cost of everything we’d been paying to use up to that point, we determined that Atlas was well worth it. The ROI of switching to Atlas is really what sold it to our leadership.”

Another factor that helped close the deal was the high level of Convex support through the process. “It was like we were already full-blown customers,” Alec says. “That’s what we wanted to see to make sure Atlas was going to do everything for us they said it would. And it did. That’s a big part of the reason we went forward.”

Now with Atlas in their arsenal, prospecting is more efficient and yields better results than ever before. Chris Wood considers it his one-stop prospecting shop. “Atlas tells you who owns the building, the previous owners, the customer names inside it, phone numbers, and emails,” he says. “The information you guys give us is amazing.” Chris also likes that Atlas enables him to adapt when targeting prospects. For instance, if he is unable to get in touch with a prospect, he uses Atlas to find another contact at that property and then updates his list. 

Alec echoes Chris’s sentiments about the benefits of Atlas. “You click on a building and see not only who owns it, but also permitting information, contacts, email addresses, phone numbers, and a lot more. So from a time standpoint, it’s been a remarkable time saver, without question.” 

In addition to helping sales teams better identify the right opportunities, Atlas also empowers them to more effectively engage with the right contacts within a prospective account. Alec’s favorite Atlas feature is the contact information associated with the properties he designates as potentials. “People come and go,” he says, “But it’s amazing to me how many times I’ll dial and get right to the person I need to talk to. That is invaluable.” 

Chris Wood uses Atlas to determine whether or not a property is worth calling on. A 100,000-square-foot building viewed via Google Earth might be a warehouse or a manufacturing or commercial building. But when he researches opportunities in Atlas, he not only finds ideal targets but also the relevant names, e-mails, and phone numbers that allow him to effectively engage a prospect.

“I’ve had multiple salespeople say Atlas is a game changer,” says Alec. “Our owner actually said he’d be afraid to take it away from us because we’ve gotten so used to it as a part of our business filter. And at the end of the day, that’s what matters to us—the sales and the growth.”

People come and go, but it’s amazing to me how many times I’ll dial and get to the right person I need to talk to. That is invaluable.”

Alec Blaine, Vice President of Business Development

Perfection Group was happy to try out Accounts and Opportunities, newly extended functionality in Atlas to help reps manage their pipeline activity more effectively. Accounts allows users to organize information, properties, and contacts related to the companies with which they do business, while Opportunities helps track potential business deals within those companies. Alec and his team use these new features to track accounts and opportunities before they are fully developed. They give the Perfection Group team an easy and convenient way to manage top-of-funnel deal information. “I consider it the gold standard in my process for accounts [to be added to backend systems] that we are around 90% sure we are going to sell,” he says. “Up to that point, these features are definitely beneficial for us.”  

As for business growth, Atlas has been instrumental in helping Perfection Group increase revenue. In just 90 days, the sales team sold contracts to two companies worth a total of $150K, with one of those on track to become a $1 million account before all is said and done. 

One surprising benefit of Atlas for Perfection Group has been its value as a recruiting solution. “For the first time in our history, we hired a corporate recruiter,” explains Alec. “We were having a hard time finding and hiring new employees, and have found Atlas to be a great application for recruiting. You can go into the People search and enter ‘HVAC,’ for example, and pull up the names of project managers, field technicians, etc. We’re trying to figure out how to best utilize it to find new employees going forward.”

Compared with some of the other technology solutions Perfection has used, Atlas has stood out to them as the clear winner. “I don’t use our CRM that much anymore,” says Alec. “It’s still active because there’s still a lot of information in it. But 90-95% of what I’m doing with prospecting is in Atlas. So we are getting away from those other tools, which was really the whole point of getting Atlas to begin with.”

Working with the Convex team throughout their journey with Atlas has been a big positive as well. The Perfection sales team has appreciated the Convex Customer Success team’s ongoing commitment to their business success. “It’s clear that you guys really care about us,” says Alec. “And we’re seeing improvements in Atlas all the time, like the Accounts and Opportunities features. You’re doing what you said you were going to do a year ago, and we appreciate that, because that’s how we run our business as well.” 

Chris agrees. “When we first started with Atlas, it was the follow-up I really appreciated, along with your availability. I could reach out anytime with a question and the response was almost instantaneous—which is great, because what we do is often on the fly. But you’ve been with us every step of the way to help us sell.” 

So what does the future hold for Perfection Group and Atlas? For Chris Wood, it’s all about the Atlas mobile app, which gives reps access to the same rich property intelligence to manage outreach from out in the field. “When we rolled out Atlas, it was in the midst of COVID, so I wasn’t able to get in front of customers as much as I wanted to,” he says. “I really like using the app and I know Convex is continually improving and updating it—which is going to be very beneficial for me since I’m out on the road a lot more now.”

From a business growth perspective, Alec Blaine has high hopes to accelerate already strong revenue growth. “Our goal is to hit $100 million per year in sales, and we hope within the next few years that we can reach $125 million, which would put us in the top 20 of mechanical contractors in the country,” he says. “So we’ve invested a lot in Atlas and other software that we want to talk with you about syncing with Atlas. We’ve grown so much because we have owners who invest in things like Atlas, and invest in their people,” he continues. “And if you keep doing what you’re doing, going to your users and asking for input, Atlas will grow with us.”

Perfection Group at a Glance

• Headquarters: Cincinnati, OH
• Service Area: Regional
• Industry: Facilities services
• Employees: 250+