imSMART

A small cost saving per head when multiplied across a giant company with thousands of people can often translate into quite a hefty sum. Thanks to its work with some of the largest science and healthcare companies in the world, San Francisco-based Compare Networks noticed that every year, quite a princely sum is spent to print and distribute product information and marketing collateral to sales personnel all over the world. But because innovation happens at breakneck speed in the fields of healthcare and biotechnology, sales personnel are always left with outdated presentations and pamphlets.

Compare Networks saw the chance to build a successful technology product that could solve this problem, and chose us to lead development efforts. Their decision to work with us came on the back of a few highly successful previous projects.

Ideas may be a dime a dozen, but it is execution that matters. Compare Networks wisely pre-sold the idea and asked us to build a minimum viable product (MVP) while meeting the deadline to ship the product to early customers. All the feedback from those initial users then went into sketching out a progressive development blueprint. As a result, that first MVP (which was nothing more than a backend API and CMS, and a native iPad app) has now grown into a fully-fledged platform with support for the web, iOS, Android, and Windows ecosystems.

Now, whenever a new piece of marketing collateral has to be distributed to a global salesforce, all that needs to be done is to upload a digital copy onto the company’s dedicated space on imSMART. The app will then notify all intended users, making sure that no one finds themselves rushing to a meeting with outdated material. 

During development, we learned that companies that use imSMART often take part in trade shows and exhibitions where custom apps such as pre-order logs and ROI calculators could come in handy. However, the weeks-long or even months-long approval process of repositories such as the Google Play store and the Apple App Store often thwarted these ambitions. That is why we decided to equip imSMART with the ability to act as a container for custom-built HTML5 apps that can be built quickly and deployed instantly. Today, we regularly build custom HTML apps for the imSMART platform, often at short-notice.

We also built in a host of other features like on-screen behaviour tracking, and two-way syncing with CRMs like Salesforce, so that the sales process becomes much more effective. For instance, imSMART can tell a sales team about which marketing collateral a potential customer looked at and for how long, so that they can make an approximation about what a prospect is actually interested in.

…is for how long we have nurtured imSMART as a product. If you’re wondering why, that’s because we work on an extended remote teams model, where we provide a dedicated software engineering team to a client. It’s a little like having your own dedicated software development team in a separate office block across town.

Throughout all these years, we’ve been able to take care of the imSMART platform so well that Compare Networks has been able to sign up more than 40 global biotechnology and healthcare giants as customers. Among them are names such as Genentech, Shofu, Lumenis, Carl Zeiss, Zimmer Dental, and Thermo Scientific. Every day, the platform is used by more than 60,000 enterprise sales personnel worldwide to help convert high-value prospects into paying customers. And we believe that all this success is reflective of the hard work we’ve put in to make imSMART a world-class software product that is both easy to use and secure as it can be.

• What we have learned from digitizing processes
• Calcey helps CompareNetworks to migrate to a Vertical Management Platform