LGG Industrial Overhauls Its Tech to ‘Balance Art and Science’

The AI revolution has provided companies across virtually all industries with the ability access a previously unfathomable breadth and depth of data. But in a segment like distribution, Tim Billingsley of LGG Industrial believes, numbers can only take you so far. 

“There is no technology yet that replaces a human relationship,” Billingsley, the vice president of revenue operations at the Pittsburgh fluid handling, sealing and material conveyance distributor, told ID in a recent interview. “I’m sure the folks in San Francisco are working hard on that, but today, you still have to have the right people going to the right place, having the right conversation, and building the right relationships — and technology has to enable that.”

LGG Industrial, which began as a Pittsburgh hose shop 90 years ago, had been known as ERIKS North America until early 2024, but after its Dutch parent sold the company to an investment firm, officials began a sweeping overhaul of the entire business: a new name, which reflected founding companies Lewis-Goetz and Goodall, along with a new-go-to-market approach — which would require major investments in both the company’s staff and processes. Billingsley, a 16-year Grainger veteran, joined LGG Industrial to help guide that project. 

Although it needed to upgrade the tech stack for its outside sales team and add a “modern” CRM solution, he believed that the company also needed a partner that fit with LGG Industrial’s business model and size. After soliciting bids for the project, the company ultimately signed with SugarCRM. Sugar, Billingsley said, was tailored to the small and mid-sized market – and particularly focused on manufacturing and distribution – but the software developer took the time to understand the company and its approach, as well. In the midst of a “full technology transformation,” involving new ERP and CRM systems, it became apparent that LGG Industrial also needed to revamp other processes.

“If you have good technology and bad process, you just do the wrong thing faster,” Billingsley said. “So we needed to invest in people, process and technology all at the same time.” Sugar, he said, also helped the company identify gaps in its customer hierarchy as it consolidated its sales process from 12 steps to four. “Once we were able to bolt the tech stack on top of that, that’s really when it started to take off like a rocket ship,” Billingsley said.

‘Crawl, Walk, Run’

LGG Industrial and Sugar said in early September that the distributor’s sales pipeline grew nearly four-fold since their collaboration began in late 2024 — and that the partnership was only just beginning. Billingsley noted that the companies were ahead of schedule on what was expected to be a three-year journey of fully implementing the new tech stack, while Dennis Smith, senior vice president of sales at SugarCRM, described that path as a “crawl, walk, run” process.

“All this technology is available, but if you’re not able to digest it, there’s no point,” Smith said. The overhaul has also enabled LGG Industrial to house its customer data in a centralized hub, which both improves its customers’ experience and helps sales reps track interactions and opportunities with those companies. LGG Industrial plans to expand its use of Sugar’s Sugar Serve platform, which Billingsley said would provide “a seamless customer experience” whether they interact with LGG Industrial through e-commerce, sales, marketing or customer service. 

He also said that although LGG Industrial plans to add more of Sugar’s AI capabilities in 2026, the company is already starting to get “really robust information” that can be converted into insights and, ultimately, “actionable, predictive chances for future success.”

“What we want Sugar to help us do is move from CRM being like a database to CRM being a wingman for our sellers,” Billingsley said of deploying more AI technologies.

Most importantly, however, Billingsley said that LGG Industrial hopes to strike a balance between “art and science” in its tech overhaul.

“Our sales team is highly tenured, they’re very experienced, very skillful. They have incredibly sticky relationships, and that’s a lot of what industrial distribution is — a relationship-type game,” Billingsley said. In his previous stops, however, implementing a new CRM system could mean shifting dramatically away from emphasizing those relationships — in favor of hard data.

“We’ve been very diligent and careful that we can’t just have adoption, and all of these metrics, being the measure of our success,” Billingsley said. “If we’re going to balance art and science, we have to let our sellers continue to be artists.”

This article originally appeared in the November/December issue of Industrial Distribution magazine. Sign up here to subscribe to ID’s Today in Industrial Distribution daily newsletter.