iTECH: Cloud-Based Services for Mobile Devices Can Help Sales Forces

PHOENIX — Sales personnel can spend more time at shippers’ offices while staying connected to carrier headquarters with cloud-based services designed for BlackBerrys, smart phones and iPads, according to presentations made here by two less-than-truckload carriers.

“You could probably enlarge the territory per [sales] agent or decrease your staff,” said Desiree Barrett, senior information technology manager in Portland, Ore., for Con-way Enterprise Services, a division of Con-way Inc. “We have no plans for that, but we are better managed.”

Barrett was talking about www.salesforce.com, which her company began using last year. It’s one of several cloud-based services — others include www.esalestrack.com, www.soffront.com, and www.allthingscrm.com — that help sales people manage their territories better and top management evaluate sales performance, the presenters said.

“You can get more done in a day’s time and work your territory more fully, without actually working longer hours,” said Woody Lovelace, vice president of corporate planning for Southeastern Freight Lines, Columbia, S.C. Southeastern also uses www.salesforce.com. 

The presentations made up an educational session in late June at a meeting of American Trucking Associations’ Information Technology & Logistics Council.

The Internet-based system can create a profile of each shipping customer and chart when a customer is most likely to need shipping, which means a salesman can synchronize his visits with a customer’s buying cycle, Barrett said. A salesman also can get information organized geographically through ZIP code clustering.

“You can measure revenue gains, either by account or in the aggregate,” she said. “We can analyze results and look at new customers, regained customers or people who have left.”

Barrett said Con-way’s dissatisfaction with its old Customer Relationship Management compelled the change. Sales personnel originally hooked up to the system with BlackBerrys, but now the LTL is adding iPads.

Con-way Inc. ranks No. 3 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of for-hire carriers and is also the third-largest LTL carrier on the list. Southeastern ranks No. 27 overall on the list and is the 12th-largest LTL.

“This is a very strong, wide-ranging system for sales automation with broad capabilities for CRM,” Lovelace said.

Training is critical, Barrett said, and Con-way started by training subject-matter experts on every major topic within the system at every service center. Typically, this training was done in two-day sessions, Barrett said. After that important first phase, then Con-way Freight proceeded with the training of the rest of its 500-person national sales group.

The new system also has allowed for better communication between Con-way’s sales and marketing groups, she said.

“The sales force had not been seeing the e-mail messages sent to their customers by the marketing department, but now they will be able to do that,” she said.

Having completed the full implementation process, Barrett said she recommends a limited initial rollout.

“We had to scale down our initial implementation. There are a lot of choices available, but you should limit yourself at the start,” she said, pointing out that more functions can be added as needed.

Lovelace agreed with Barrett that wireless devices now have enough power that it is not necessary for sales people to travel always with laptops.

“A BlackBerry or smart phone screen is too small, but you can do a very good sales presentation for one to three people with an iPad now,” he said.

Both corporations also have truckload operations, and Barrett and Lovelace said there is nothing about sales automation that is unique to LTL, although a system would need to be customized in a different configuration for truckload or other applications.

Back at headquarters, sales vice presidents can examine performance with “scorecards” and “dashboards” that offer a variety of indicators that could be either backward or forward looking.

“Regional vice presidents can look at what’s going on by service center or drill down to individuals,” Lovelace said.