Building a business in Nigeria is not for the faint-hearted. The logistics are complex, the infrastructure uneven, and the talent pool — while significant — requires deliberate investment to develop. For Choice International, these challenges were not obstacles to avoid. They were the business.Since 2015, Choice International has been one of the most active foreign enterprises in Nigeria's consumer and industrial markets. Under the leadership of Chairwoman Chen Xiuxia, the group established KD manufacturing plants for GREE air conditioners and GAC passenger vehicles, invested in state government public transportation projects, and created thousands of local jobs. As the exclusive largest trader for the GREE brand in Africa, Choice International has built a commercial operation that spans product distribution, engineering project delivery, and after-sales service — all managed by a growing team of Nigerian local staff.The group's commercial activities are organized across three divisions:
- GREE Division — Air conditioning distribution, channel sales, and engineering projects
- LONTOR Division — Small home appliance distribution and channel sales
- GAC Division — Passenger vehicle sales (CRM deployment in planning)
In recognition of her contribution to local industrial development and job creation, Chairwoman Chen Xiuxia was named VANGUARD 2021 Best Foreign Investor — the first Chinese entrepreneur to receive this honour.
The Challenge
Choice International's early-stage operations were manageable through a combination of China-based direct management, WeCom, DingTalk, and a legacy U8 ERP system. As long as the team was small and the business relatively contained, these tools held.That changed as the Nigerian operation scaled. The shift from expat-led distributor management to a large local workforce — recruiting, training, and deploying Nigerian staff to open new market territory — introduced a new layer of complexity that existing tools could not absorb:
- No visibility into distributed field operations. Distributor development, deal follow-up, and sales progress were tracked informally. Headquarters in Asia had no reliable, real-time window into what was happening on the ground in Lagos. Decisions about market coverage, resource allocation, and performance were made without structured data.
- No governance for a growing local team. As the number of locally hired sales staff grew, managing their daily activity, sales reporting, and performance accountability became increasingly difficult without a system. The sales director had no scalable mechanism to monitor and coach a dispersed field team.
- No standardized after-sales operation. The GREE COOLMAN programme — Choice International's initiative to train and certify local air conditioning technicians — was growing rapidly. But the after-sales operation had no systematic workflow for job dispatch, service tracking, or technician commission settlement. Every installation was handled ad hoc. There was no quality baseline, no visibility, and no scalable model.
The Solution
Choice International engaged ShareCRM in September 2021 following a structured vendor evaluation. The implementation was designed in phases — beginning with GREE Division sales in 2021, expanding to LONTOR Division in 2022, and with GAC Division currently in planning — under a "holistic plan, step-by-step execution" deployment philosophy led by COO Wang.Sales Management Platform (GREE & LONTOR Divisions)ShareCRM built a full Lead-to-Cash sales management layer for Choice International's distributor and engineering channels, covering:
- Lead management and distributor development tracking — from initial outreach through qualification, partnership onboarding, and ongoing account management
- Project management for engineering contracts — with cost and margin tracked at the individual job level, giving management precise P&L visibility on every project
- Order management integrated with the existing U8 ERP system — closing the loop between front-end sales activity and back-end inventory and finance
- Sales reporting and daily activity management — giving the sales director structured tools to monitor field team behaviour, coach performance, and enforce accountability
Deployment across a Nigerian local team introduced a set of challenges that required targeted engineering solutions: poor network connectivity caused data packet loss; time zone differences between Lagos and Asia complicated support response; and the system needed to support multiple languages, currencies, and international mapping. ShareCRM's team deployed a dedicated CDN node in Lagos to resolve the connectivity issue — dramatically improving system responsiveness for local users. The GREE Division went live in November 2022 after approximately 100 days of joint implementation effort.After-Sales Service Platform (GREE COOLMAN)The second phase addressed Choice International's most operationally complex challenge: building an after-sales service system from scratch for a team of Nigerian local technicians who had never used a CRM tool.ShareCRM worked with Choice International's project team to design the COOLMAN service operation from the ground up — defining the team structure, management model, service workflows, business rules, and key control points. The resulting platform was purpose-built for simplicity: the interface was stripped to its essentials so that local COOLMAN technicians could dispatch jobs, log service completion, and receive commission settlements with minimal training overhead.The after-sales platform went live after four months of joint implementation — the first purely overseas after-sales service deployment in ShareCRM's history. ShareCRM also supported the app's listing on Google Play, enabling direct mobile access for field technicians operating across Lagos.
The Results
- Real-time HQ visibility into Nigeria field operations. Distributor pipeline status, sales team activity, and project progress are now accessible to leadership anywhere in the world — in real time. The information gap between headquarters and the Lagos operation has been closed.
- Standardized after-sales service across the COOLMAN network. GREE technicians now operate within a structured dispatch and service workflow. Job completion is logged, quality is tracked, and commission is settled automatically per job — giving technicians a transparent, reliable earnings model and giving management a scalable service operation.
- Engineering project P&L tracked at job level. Cost and margin data is captured on every engineering project, giving management the decision-grade financial visibility needed to optimize project selection and pricing.
- Sales and after-sales unified on one platform. With both the LTC sales flow and the ITR after-sales flow running on ShareCRM, Choice International now operates a fully integrated commercial system — from lead acquisition through distributor management, project delivery, and post-installation service.
- Local workforce enabled at scale. By designing the system around the working habits and technical capacity of Nigerian local staff — with simplified interfaces, local-language support, and mobile-first access — ShareCRM enabled Choice International to scale its local team without scaling its management overhead.
Conclusion
Choice International's deployment is a demonstration of what it takes to build a genuinely international CRM operation — not just a system translated into another language, but a platform re-engineered for a different infrastructure environment, a different workforce, and a different operational reality. For enterprises expanding into frontier markets, the lesson is clear: the right CRM partner doesn't just configure software. They help you build the management model from scratch.Ready to scale your overseas operations with a CRM built for global complexity? Talk to a ShareCRM Expert →