Gorilla spoke with David Maggs, Director of Structuring & Pricing. Download all materials here.

The Company:

Gas South is one of the largest retail natural gas providers to over 470 ,000 residential, business and government customers in 14 states spanning across the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. Gas South is an Atlanta-based subsidiary of Cobb EMC, providing simple natural gas plans and excellent customer service. Gas South upholds its purpose to Be A Fuel For Good by giving back 5% of their annual profits to help children in need, prioritizing basic needs, education and health.

The Challenge:

The biggest factor driving Gas South towards a new data solution was the acquisition of a competitor, which greatly increased the overall size of the company.

“Acquiring a competitor and suddenly growing very rapidly meant that  a lot of the solutions we had in place did not scale well to the new size of our business.”
_{David Maggs}

At the same time, Gas South’s existing solution was not performing to expectations and there was room for improvement.

“[Generating a quote] was taking several minutes in most cases, and something that [the sales team] wanted was the ability to be on a call with a potential customer, run pricing during that call and be able to potentially close a deal rather than have wait to generate a quote”

Secondary aims were to maintain accuracy in pricing while increasing efficiency and enabling the pricing team to manage their products effectively.

Gorilla’s Solution:

“We didn’t want to sacrifice any accuracy and … other solutions that we considered had a tradeoff between either accuracy, efficiency, or the ability for our team to manage our own products. It was difficult to find a solution that hit all three, and ultimately Gorilla was that solution.”

Gas South began to seek a change, looking at Gorilla alongside several other options including an in-house developed solution. As Gas South was the first US-based customer that Gorilla would work with, some effort was needed to customize Gorilla’s pricing applications and deliver workflows that could handle the unique needs of Gas South’s different markets.

To accomplish this, Gorilla and Gas South began working on a pilot project that would cover the pricing needs of Gas South’s Floridian customers, with Gorilla team members travelling to Gas South’s Atlanta office on multiple occasions to discuss their needs and add suitable capabilities to Gorilla.

The final result successfully filled all of the unique requirements of the Florida market, and confirmed to Gas South that Gorilla was the right choice.

“What sold us on Gorilla ultimately was the rapid and thorough development work that Gorilla put in over that period of time. What started as a purely out of the box solution quickly became accurately tailored to what we needed.”

The Future

It is only the beginning of the collaboration between Gas South and Gorilla. The Gas South team are still building towards the official go-live date, with the upcoming months focusing on rebuilding existing pricing models and integrating them with Gorilla, while coordinating with Salesforce integrators. In the long-term Gas South will explore additional applications of Gorilla's tools for budget reforecasting and automated pricing rounds.

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