Customer Growth Journey with APC

Since its founding in 1982, Associated Premium Corporation in Cincinnati, OH, has grown to over 20 employees and become a trusted partner to the NFL, MLB, NBA, NJ and many other minor league sports enterprises.To celebrate their 40th anniversary, Associated Premium Corporation rebranded as ‘APC’ and launched a fresh new website and logo. Always striving to stay top of trend, and cutting edge, APC continues to recruit top talent from younger generations to continue the APC legacy and cement an even brighter future for the company!

After using another system for over 20 years, and becoming increasingly frustrated with the manual process, Lauren Ficke Graden, Account Executive at APC, made it her personal mission from her first day on the job to change systems and move towards a more modern workflow. Lauren recalls, “Sales Reps would create a quote for customers, then write up orders (sometimes physically handwritten, not even email!) and hand them to their assistants who would re-enter this order into our system and send it to suppliers. The duplicate work and messy paper trails were exhausting to keep up with, not to mention creating a huge environmental waste.”

As a legacy team, with some team members holding upwards of 20 years of experience, the idea of changing systems didn’t come without careful consideration and evaluation of the platform. Once they decided to make the switch, the APC team fully embraced it! “Our Customer Success Rep at commonsku became our personal commonsku guru and walked us through every step of the system!” remarked Lauren, “We spread out the training over the course of a couple of weeks with about 5, 1-hour long sessions. The pace of the training was amazing so that we had time to digest the information and practice between sessions.”

After being fully trained in January of 2021, the APC team now loves sharing new tricks and learning about new features on the commonsku platform. Lauren’s top piece of advice for new companies joining commonsku? “Go all in. Truly block out the time to be fully present during the training and put in the work. commonsku is intuitive, but you need to put in the time to complete the homework assignments and practice in order to learn all the unique features and to get the most out of the platform.”