Case Studies
Eagle Rock’s paylink Rollout Strategy Leads to Significant Adoption Rates
Eagle Rock Distributing Co. explains how their paylink rollout strategy led to rapid adoption. The result? Easier payments and significant time savings.
April 26, 2023
INDUSTRY: Distributor PRIMARY BEVERAGE: Beer
Eagle Rock is a beverage distributor servicing over 14,000 retailers across Colorado and Georgia. As a leader in beverage distribution, Eagle Rock has an opportunistic and progressive mindset. They leverage technology to uncover future-forward, strategic advantages and have leveraged paylink since March 2022.
What is paylink?
paylink is an easy-to-use payment processing tool that helps you get paid faster, advance operational savings, eliminate manual AR reconciliation, and maximize delivery efficiency. paylink users have seen significant time and labor savings and impressive adoption rates among retail customers.
Eagle Rock faced a cumbersome and time-consuming process when collecting and reconciling checks
Like many distributors, Eagle Rock identified pain points associated with payment collection. It took significant amounts of time for salespeople and drivers to collect checks and it created more work for accounting teams because it forced a substantial amount of manual check reconciliation and data re-entry.
When Eagle Rock expanded beyond Georgia and into Colorado, they knew that, at scale, check collection and payment reconciliation was an area they needed to improve.
Given the 28-day payment terms out in Colorado, specifically, if an outstanding balance hits a certain benchmark, that customer may no longer be able to make purchases until the balance is cleared. This situation cuts into account managers’ revenue commissions. Our account managers started to connect the dots of like, ‘Hey, I really need to streamline how my retailers are paying because it's starting to affect my paycheck. It eats into my time, and I now have to work twice as hard to get this account back in good standing.’
Director of Sales Technology, Eagle Rock Distributing Co.
While searching for digital payment solutions that could quell the frustration of slow collection processes and growing numbers of outstanding payments, Eagle Rock took a unique approach to vet potential solutions that could give their retail customers a more hopeful look at the future.
We've conditioned retailers to understand and expect a certain way of doing business. And we've done things in the very same manner for decades now. So retailers just got used to writing checks and any derivation from that was just something unfamiliar to them.
Director of Sales Technology, Eagle Rock Distributing Co.
By utilizing three digital payment processing solutions at once, Eagle Rock was able to find the most effective solution for their customers and begin to think about market-wide implementation.
We’d heard the buzz and possibilities of an online payment solution, but nothing that was viable to implement market-wide at the time.
Director of Sales Technology, Eagle Rock Distributing Co.
Eagle Rock needed something that was applicable to both small, independent accounts as well as large format chain locations to effectively cover their entire customer base. They began to vet payment processing solutions to determine which might be the most effective for their organization and their retail customers.
Eagle Rock’s unique rollout strategy continues to make a significant impact on their customers and operational efficiency
Eagle Rock decided to leave the decision about which payment solution was best in the hands of their retailers. They partnered with a handful of digital payment solutions and learned the value of each from their retailers.
paylink, because of its ease-of-use and direct connection to Encompass, just rose to the top and positioned itself the best option market-wide.
Director of Sales Technology, Eagle Rock Distributing Co.
Eagle Rock’s recognition of what’s possible led them to push paylink to their entire customer base. A handful of account managers were introduced to paylink first, and once they saw the benefit, there was a natural gravitation toward PayLink from Eagle Rock’s internal teams.
Once we got those key account managers on board, having them adopt the paylink process, they began seeing the benefits. They’re saving time throughout the day not having to collect paper checks and chase outstanding balances.
Director of Sales Technology, Eagle Rock Distributing Co.
This led to a groundswell of adoption of paylink for Eagle Rock’s sales force, which trickled into the market as more reps onboarded more retailers. In less than a year, Eagle Rock has grown their use of paylink from:
They now have 3,464 (and counting!) customers utilizing paylink and have processed nearly 40,000 digital payments.
I think the impact has been massive. We’re averaging about 60% of our customers using digital payments between both Colorado and Georgia. I didn't anticipate that high of a number when we began. At the time, an optimistic number may have been 25% to 30%, but to get to a point as quickly as we did where over half of our customer base was paying via paylink or a digital payment solution was phenomenal.
Director of Sales Technology, Eagle Rock Distributing Co.
Eagle Rock seeks to go paperless in the near future, further expanding the use of paylink to regional chains
We're looking to see how far we can take this on the independent side while exploring what the chain applications are.
Director of Sales Technology, Eagle Rock Distributing Co.
Looking ahead, Eagle Rock will push toward a completely paperless operation. paylink will be instrumental in helping them achieve this goal by providing digital alternatives to checks that don’t just make payments easier, but help organizations like Eagle Rock reduce their environmental impact.
We'd like to see how paylink and Encompass continue to evolve, which sparks new lines of thinking internally at Eagle Rock. So it's really just evolving with you and getting even more aggressive with applying paylink to our customer base. We can't get away from paper checks fast enough
Director of Sales Technology, Eagle Rock Distributing Co.
Interested in taking advantage of paylink digital payments for your business? Speak with our team today.
