Electrasource Energy Advisors

Having used a CRM system designed specifically for Retail Energy Brokers (CORE) since January of 2017, the merger between Energy Frameworks (CORE) and Powermatrix (Sparkplug), which was announced in August of 2019, prompted management to evaluate all available options knowing that a pending migration to Sparkplug was coming in 2020. Although ESA liked Sparkplug, they were curious to see what else was out there. ESA had one clear objective in mind – migrating to a platform that would help streamline business operations including sales and finance to enhance customer communication & business planning. A few of the biggest decision-making parameters was ease of implementation, ease of use and accuracy of data – as this is what CORE has provided to ESA for so long.

“First we considered a handful of products and then narrowed it down to 3 to demo. Salesforce, Edge on Demand, SoftSmiths, and Enerclix were among those considered. We then deeply reviewed 3 products/platforms in addition to Sparkplug. The first was a large established SaaS product which had many features that we would not use and the cost was prohibitive. The second product we considered was on the opposite end of the spectrum. It was an energy broker focused product but incredibly early on in development. And although they were up front with us in disclosing that they would be using us to further develop the product, with the other products out there, we didn’t feel like the savings would be worth all the time we would spend. The final product we reviewed was very promising and fairly inexpensive. Once we started down the road with testing the system, we found out that there was a lack of performance related to the lower cost. ” – Nikki Brown, Senior Pricing Manager – Electrasource Advisors

The Enerex team has built Sparkplug to be an entire lead-quote-contract automation tool along with accurate commission reconciliation and payments to agents. With features like EDI/HU, Digital signature integrations, ESID and ECL lookup tools – Sparkplug truly focuses on making Energy Brokerage firms lives easier.

“Over the past 3+ years, we have found that the platform is user friendly, the Customer Success team (training and helpdesk) are very responsive. Our financial team feels very confident with reporting data that comes from the system. And the re-work reports keep us up to date on expiring deals. After reviewing the demo of Sparkplug, we saw many of the same features and a whole lot of new ones that looked very interesting! During our comparison process we found cheaper is NOT always better. The combination of knowing that the transition was being carried out by the same Customer Success team (led by Karen Altekruse) that we know and trust, the new value added Sparkplug features that we have seen, and the future plans Enerex shared with us, gave us all the confidence in the world to sign for a longer term agreement with Enerex.” – Nikki Brown, Senior Pricing Manager – Electrasource Advisors

“After deciding that Enerex was our chosen vendor for the future, I sat down with Karen Altekruse to review the plan to convert us from CORE to Sparkplug. It was incredibly thorough and well thought out. Made me feel very comfortable that they are putting the client first and that the transition should be as smooth as possible.” – Nikki Brown, Senior Pricing Manager – Electrasource Advisors

Enerex is incredibly excited to be serving ESA’s software needs for years to come!