Industry Analysts’ Sales Dashboard App Brings the Sales Pitch into the 21st Century

Sample screen from the IA Sales Dashboard app.

This is cool if you’re a dealer sales rep, sales manager, or owner. Imagine a mobile app that functions as a presentation tool, or better yet a virtual pitch book with all your product brochures, videos, reliability comparisons, and presentations, etc. You can e-mail and sign orders on the tablet, and send brochures to the customer. And if you’re management, this app ensures that all your reps are on the same page with consistent current product information, pricing, etc. It’s called the Industry Analysts Sales Dashboard and can be seen here: http://www.industryanalysts.com/IA10/Dashboard.html

“It’s a great differentiator and allows reps to give better, more professional presentations using digital technology instead of pitching how they are technology gurus only to hand the customer paper brochures, paper pricing, etc.” says Andy Slawetsky, president of Industry Analysts. “It makes the dealer look like they have their own app developers because the app has their logo on the home screen.”

The IA Sales Dashboard works with iPads and droid-based devices. A Galaxy Tab version is on the way.

What’s nice about this from a dealer perspective is that once they sign up for a subscription, it can be customized specifically to that dealer’s product and service offerings.

“The content is loaded by them, managed by them, they can put pricing on there, they’re the only ones with access to it, it’s their subscription,” explains Slawetsky. “It essentially allows the dealer or manufacturer or dealer to standardize the pitch book.”

Industry Analysts can help point the dealer in the direction of content, and dealers who subscribe to Industry Analysts’ services can include some of that content as well. Every dealer dashboard looks different. When the app is accessed the first thing that comes up is the dealer’s logo.

“It’s much easier than if a dealer were to try and pull this together on their own,” says Slawetsky. “It has every single piece of information and collateral we have. It makes your dealership look more sophisticated to the customer and gives it a higher tech feel.”

It’s a turnkey app and the dealer simply logs onto a Website to upload content and brand it.

For dealers selling solutions the app can even allow the sales rep to look up solutions by vertical market. For example, when in front of a customer in the education market, they can access the various solutions for that market and the app brings up the script for each given solution. They may not know what that product is, but under it, the script asks ‘do you need preprinted forms, do you need mobile printing, and depending on the answer the sales rep hits a button and a brochure for that app pops up. When the rep is done talking about the solution or a product, he can e-mail the brochure directly from the device to the customer.

Pricing is subscription based by number of users in the dealership.

So far the feedback, whether it’s from dealers or the OEMs, who are another target market for the app, has been great.

“Everybody who has seen it has been blown away,” states Slawetsky. “They love it. The question is whether they want to spend the money on it.”

Although Industry Analysts is just beginning to market the app, future enhancements are already in the planning stages. Expect to see an MPS site survey tool along with all sorts of customization that the manufacturer or even the larger dealers can use to tie it into their CRM systems in the near future. 

 

 

 

Scott Cullen
About the Author
Scott Cullen has been writing about the office technology industry since 1986. He can be reached at scott_cullen@verizon.net.