Pastel Group are a market leading Telecoms and IT provider, with offices in Stoke-on-Trent, Southampton and Truro. With over 10 years of working in the SME and Corporate space Pastel pride themselves on having a customer first approach.
Since 2018, the company has added energy to its portfolio and has been successfully supporting and switching its customers ever since.
Explaining what sold them on becoming an energy partner five years ago, Sales Director Ollie Moseley said: “In the market of communications a lot of the growth is by incremental run rate business and If you want to continue that expansion, you must take the wholesale route.
This progression translates to us having full ownership of the customer we are contracting with, enabling us to fully support from end to end.
However, this can be a challenge for any business because you’ve gone from selling a product, making commission, paying the bills, and repeating that process. Whereas a wholesale margin is made over the life of the contract.
So as a business, it can be quite difficult to make that jump to wholesale.
“Now, something that can help with that is by sourcing a product or service that still works on an upfront model to assist the growth in the business. When we looked at energy, it was such an easy decision to make, as it is just an additional service that slotted into the consultative sale that we’re used to. With energy, a lot of the suppliers pay us up front, so it’s welcome addition to our ongoing revenue.”
After five years of partnership, Ollie outlined what Fidelity Energy do differently that helps them stand apart from the crowd.
“The main piece of feedback I have had from my team is that the outstanding feature is the Fidelity Energy portal. With energy we almost spend the least amount of time on it, but we can get the maximum reward. Unlike a lot of others there are minimal touch points, so in an environment where we just need the information and need it automated, a decent portal is pure gold for any business.
“With the Fidelity Energy team, no question is a silly question and they are constantly there to help us, through onboarding and sales training to support on deals. If there is something we want or need, they will ensure we have tailored support so we can make selling energy a success to our specific customer base. Energy is a market that is forever fluctuating. but they also provide us with all the marketing collateral we need to promote the energy offering as well as information so we can understand the energy market ourselves when discussing it with customers.
“And the thing they have done really well is assign us our own internal account manager. I think a lot of companies only give ownership of an account to one person within their business. Then the problem you’ve got there is that person is expected to be on the road and to promote, but that isn’t always the most effective way, and they cannot always be reactive when something urgent is needed. “Having internal support from a single person backed up by the whole Fidelity Energy team has been really helpful to us.”
Pastel has been successful in selling energy alongside its core business of Telecoms and IT, so much so, that it has helped build on existing customer relationships and make their customers more sticky.
Ollie said: “It is nice to have additional product to sell in an incredibly competitive market. If we do a good job with another product it puts us at a strong advantage for the other services we can offer. We have seen a lot of success in adding energy, even with customers who have multiple meters. This has not been an issue and we can help them manage their whole portfolio and take the stress off their hands. Due to this we have recently managed to help one of our larger customers with their electricity contracts and with the extra support we were given from Fidelity, we successfully migrated them over and managed to show the advantage of having strong customer engagement.
“As a company, Fidelity Energy has such a wealth of energy knowledge and experience, so when the energy crisis began, I thought that would almost be the nail in the coffin for energy. But what happened was we managed to help a load of people. The team at Fidelity Energy kept us updated on the market throughout and this resulted in us protecting our customers from some hefty increases.”
“We looked like fortune tellers! We were ahead of the curve on something they didn’t know about. That’s got great cross-sell appeal, because then when we discuss market trends in the communication and IT sector, we have the strongest possible customer confidence.