Category: Interactive Briefing

In today’s selling climate, clients demand superior customer service and a one-to-one dialog with your brand. To meet clients’ growing expectations, reps must monitor customer data to understand each client’s pain points and sell to them more effectively. The amount of data available can be overwhelming. Luckily, technology is the game changer to collect all that disparate data and contextualize it for reps, so it is actionable and useful. Whereoware’s Spotlight Sales App, winner of the Web Marketing Association’s Best B2B Mobile Application at the 2014 MobileWebAwards, bundles the data, tools, and targeted training reps need to succeed into an intuitive mobile app.

Sales reps juggle meetings, clients, and deadlines and are rarely in a single place for long. We developed Spotlight to help reps be as effective on the road and from a hotel as they are from their home base. With this in mind, Spotlight is designed to be extremely agile – reps can browse products in a sales meeting and then place the order from the cab ride home, even with spotty WiFi.

Allowing reps to go about their daily activities uninterrupted, Spotlight’s engine syncs records and captures reps actions in an offline queue that fires in batches once service is available. Reps experience the sync as automatic, with no interruption to their day-to-day work or waiting for the app to catch up. The Spotlight sync is unobtrusive, but effective, transmitting everything reps need to work offline. The sync engine means that product data and product imagery is always up-to-date.

Mobility is awesome, but actionable and accessible data is often the missing puzzle piece for sales apps. Giving reps access to all the leads in the database (not limiting to leads they manually entered) was a priority. We integrated Spotlight with marketing automation tool Silverpop, giving reps access to all their leads. The sync engine is universal, so transmitting Silverpop’s lead information was simple, but with so many leads, how could reps effectively focus their attention?

A customized scoring model incorporates leads’ online behavior from Silverpop (emails opened, webpages visited, items purchased, etc.) and offline behavior (interactions in meetings). When a lead becomes hot, we push a notification to their reps’ iPad. This allows the rep to focus their attention on the right leads at the right time. We added a “sales rep grade” column in Spotlight, allowing reps to manually adjust lead scores to reflect positive or negative in-person meetings. This data gives reps a client’s full online and offline history before walking into a sales meeting. Better preparation leads to more successful meetings.

To help reps be more efficient, we also integrated Spotlight with Apple’s Core Location framework. Reps can finish a meeting early and then search for other leads in close proximity to their present location by selecting a search radius. The search results also show the customers’ lead score and profile. Spotlight than calls Apple’s framework to generate and display turn-by-turn directions using GPS.

To save money and time on returned order package (because of incorrect or missing addresses), we built Spotlight with the capability to verify addresses when an order is placed. When a rep is placing an order and filling out the address field, Spotlight calls the UPS API framework to verify whether the address is “good” or if an alternative addresses is a better match. Once an acceptable address is selected, reps can fully submit their order.

Sales reps managing territories can oftentimes end up with a lone wolf mentality. They are responsible for bringing in new clients and orders, but are working predominantly without day-to-day supervision and training. Leadership can feel powerless, as sales reps interact with customers and represent their brand without direct management oversight, and reps can feel frustrated by the lack of relevant feedback.

While, Spotlight always captured sales rep activity – products ordered, GPS location of the app, customers searched and visited etc., there wasn’t an easy way to analyze this information. In our iOS Developer’s Arrash’s words, “Data is just data until its useful, and then it’s information.” To make the data actionable, we built custom pages to deliver graphs and reporting functionality. In near real time, leadership can review reps’ sales activity (the customers visited and products shown at each visit) to pinpoint areas of weaknesses and develop solutions to improve performance. Training can be tailored to a rep’s unique needs, improving the sales team overall and increasing sales.

We joke that Spotlight lets management attend every sales meeting. Between the tools ability to please clients, empower and train sales teams, and let leadership sleep easy, Spotlight is no joke. When reps can consistently place orders and give clients a seamless, reliable buying experience, they are more productive in their day-to-day role and can focus on building positive relationships and increasing brand credibility.

Jim Rothey is Partner and CTO at digital agency Whereoware, located in the Washington D.C. metro region. With over 21 years specializing in mobile and data management systems, Jim heads up the mobile team. He has 4 software patents.