What has technology done for your sales effort lately, good, bad or indifferent?

 

Jay Winnerman is the sales manager for Floralife.

 

"We are in the postharvest flower-care business. We sell products to extend the base life of fresh-cut flowers. We sell through a wholesale network, and we make our product available on our Website for direct consumer purchase. I have nine salespeople on my team for the entire United States.

 

We use a wide variety of technologies to sell. First, I have to stay in touch with my salespeople across the country, and they are on the road a lot. We use chiefly emails and cell phones to stay in touch.

 

We use personal digital assistants (PDAs) to store appointments, data and lots of phone numbers. We are also big users of Outlook for scheduling meetings and appointments. We also use it for emails.

 

We have a customer relationship management (CRM) system that has been helpful. It is a great organizational tool.

 

All our reps have laptops, and they will sometimes take their laptops in for appointments, depending on what type of presentation they have to do. We also use training videos for our customers."

 

Dan Blatt is the sales manager for Nationwide Medical Surgical.

 

"We sell pharmaceutical products, mostly to hospitals.

 

We use a lot of technology in our sales effort. For communicating with our customers, we primarily use telephone, email and cell phones. We make limited use of fax machines.

 

For communicating within our company, we at times use instant messaging, depending on what it is for. Primarily, we use email, phones and cell phones.

 

Our sales reps all have laptops, but they do not generally use them to make sales. We do use PowerPoint and the like.

 

We use sales-contact software, such as ACT! and Outlook. We have an IBM-based AS/400 system for keeping track of inventories and customers.

 

Email is invaluable, although at times, email is overused. Sometimes, people get lazy and try to resolve issues by email that should be resolved in person. It is a question of which approach would be most effective. Everyone needs to understand when to use each mode of communication."

 

Bill Tuthill is the sales manager with Toshiba Business Solutions New York.

 

"We recently became a branch of Toshiba Corporation. We sell office-imaging equipment to businesses in five counties in the mid-Hudson region.

 

We use all the basic technologies. Like everyone else, we have gone from beepers to cell phones and from Day-Timers to Palm Pilots. Some of my guys use more applications than others do.

 

As a company, we have been working with CRM software since about 1996 or 1997. We started off with a system provided by one of our OEMs, but it had a Y2K issue, so we switched to a proprietary system.

 

CRM has been absolutely useful. It does several things for us. First, it is a reminder to our guys of how long something has been going on. They set it up to automatically remind them of important dates.

 

For example, six months after a customer has bought a product, it will remind the salesperson that it has been six months. Sometimes, when you are busy on a day-to-day basis, time gets away from you, and all of a sudden it has been six or eight months. When it comes time for the customer to turn around his equipment, we don’t want to be just another empty suit showing up after three years.

 

We are in an industry with a growth margin of 3 percent, so we must nurture our customers to keep them away from other companies. We can set up the CRM so that, instead of a reminder, it automatically sends a letter out in 90 days, letting the customer know we are thinking of them and asking if there have been any changes.

 

We use CRM for our prospects, too. If salespeople are out cold calling, they bring in the business cards and set up their priorities. Fifteen years ago, we had the old tickler files for classifying who is hot and who is not. Now, they prioritize them on CRM, and they come up when they need to come up. I have actually had prospects call us and tell us the reason we are in front of them is because they always got a letter from us. They know who we are – which is more important than us knowing them.

 

When our salespeople go out, they know they are building a database. They are accomplishing something, and they will not have to recreate it. If you cold call and pull in 50 cards, you do not want to do it all over again; you want to get something out of it.

 

All our reps have laptops, and we are on the verge with Toshiba of implementing a Web-based CRM system, so our reps will be able to check in. They all have wireless capabilities.

 

The only problem with CRM occurs when a rep doesn’t fully use it. I used to sell security systems, and when you have a hole in your perimeter, you might as well have nothing. That is the same for CRM; it can be compromised. Say you want to send a mailer out to an entire ZIP code, but there is a hole in the data. CRM is only as good as what you put into it.

 

We also do some presentations on our laptops. For introductory meetings and some proposals, we can do video clips, as well. This has not really taken off yet, however.

 

Our reps also use Palm Pilots for contacts, and some use Outlook. I use my Palm Pilot to keep my own personal schedule, and then I sync it in to Outlook as a fallback, in case the Palm Pilot goes down. Other guys do the same.

 

I love Selling Power, and we use Selling Power Live as our swapping library. I log into it because I am the first one in; then we use it in our sales meetings; and then our salespeople sign out for it to listen for a week. We have been swapping this way for three years."

 

Anthony Gawenda is a sales manager for Cintas Corporation.

 

"We sell uniform-rental programs to businesses. We use the basics – email, voice mail and cell phones – to stay in touch, and we use Outlook for scheduling. Periodically, we will do a PowerPoint presentation for one of our prospects, but 96 percent of the time, we just go into a place and present verbally, while flipping through our sales binders. It is a face-to-face sale."

 

 

Stan Gargani is the sales manager for Budget Blinds of Rockford, IL.

 

"We sell blinds to homeowners and businesses. I’ve been selling for 40 years, and I do have a computer. I use Outlook to keep track of my appointments, and I send out emails.

 

From what I have heard, there are computer programs that some other companies have used. They take digital photos and can show the customer what the new blinds will look like. We haven’t gone there yet. I am sure there are some franchisees around the country that use laser measuring tools, and some salespeople have laptops that they carry into consumers’ homes.

 

If we want a picture, we can go to the consumer’s own computer. Most of our vendors have Websites where we can download pictures of different kinds of blinds to see what they look like in different colors on different windows."

 

Pat Devine is a sales manager with Prudential LRES Realty.

 

"Technology helps a lot in real estate right now. We use virtual tours on our listings, and we have automatic emails, or e-cards, to send out to our clients.

 

With virtual tours, you can go online to look at not only the outside of a home but also go inside and a have a tour of the interior with pictures. You can see the rooms and everything.

 

What this does is enable buyers to take a look at the home and see, to the best of their knowledge, whether it is what they would be interested in looking at. It is all done over the Web. We give our clients access to our Web page, so they can go online and look at the homes.

 

These virtual tours can be useful for long-distance sales. I had a call yesterday from another brokerage in Fargo about a buyer who lives a long way from here and was interested in looking at one of my listings, without actually being here.

 

Our company is just getting started at virtual tours, but many companies have made sales this way. Basically, what they do is eliminate what buyers do not want to see. People have the time to see 20 homes. They can narrow them down to three to five houses online and then make a commitment on one of those properties.

 

E-cards are set up through our Prudential franchise. We can broadcast emails to our clients about a home in their neighborhood that has been sold or a birthday greeting or general information. This helps to stay in touch with people."

 

Patrick Kelleher is a sales manager with Colorado Machinery Company.

 

"Technology is becoming bigger and bigger with us. We sell heavy construction equipment (prices run from $10,000 to $800,000), and our salespeople are on the job site all the time, not in an office setting. They have to be pretty mobile, working out of the cab of a pickup truck.

 

They already have laptops with a lot of stuff on them, including software from equipment manufacturers, the ACT! account-management program and quoting programs. We just added a cell-phone card that connects them with the office, so they are able to access all the information on our products from wherever they are. They can get costs and all the options available from the seat of their trucks. They just plug in their laptop, and it operates like a wireless.

 

This technology helps us keep them in the field. There are lots of details they need that they have not had access to from the field and had to get from the office. Now, they can connect their laptops, access all those details, put a price together on a quarter-million-dollar piece of equipment and be accurate and complete.

We run a lean organization, and we always want to keep them in the field and out of the office. My own customers are owner-operators, with a couple of machines in their fleets, and I have to be where they are, which is on the job site.

 

We all use cell phones, and most of our customers are on the Nextel network. Recently, we talked about going off this network, and all our customers told us they wanted us to stay on Nextel, so they could find us anytime."

 

Rick Tallichet is the director of sales for JLG ServicePlus.

 

"JLG is the world leader in the manufacture of aerial work platforms and the leading manufacturer of tele-handlers in North America. These are the boom-and-scissor-type lifts and telescopic forklifts that are primarily used by construction contractors to lift workers and materials. We sell through dealers and directly to companies that rent equipment to contractors.

 

Technology is useful to us. We use salesforce.com not only as a marketing tool but also as a database, so anyone in the company – from service, parts, sales or operations – can look at an account and see the account activity by location. We have 40 salespeople. Whenever the call center in our headquarters gets a call, they log it in by location. So whenever an account manager walks into a customer’s office, he can see all that has happened before, and when he walks out he will log in notes for that customer. It is really a CRM system; it is a fantastic system. We make heavy use of it. Salesforce.com also does territory management. You can set it up by ZIP code or by quadrant of a city, however you want to. It is a good program.

 

We also have laptops, and Microsoft Office is very helpful. We use PowerPoint and word processing and Excel spreadsheets.

 

I use a wireless laptop in the field. I wear reading glasses, and the big screen helps me out. Some of our salespeople like BlackBerry wireless products, and we have a choice between wireless laptops and the BlackBerry."