Background
Duffel bag carrying, hassled sales reps tearing out their hair with outdated product information and marketing collateral, to iPad-wielding, smooth, customized content presenting, sales intelligence gathering forces with perfectly coiffed hair. The difference? imSMART.
A mobile app by CompareNetworks, imSMART, is an enterprise sales, marketing and training platform that gives companies the ability to centralize and distribute sales and marketing materials to mobile sales teams, create custom presentations and gather detailed analytics of every customer interaction.
Challenge
CompareNetworks is a global media company in the business of connecting buyers and suppliers through digital media in niche industries.
Through their experience working with some of the largest companies in the life science, medicine and pharmaceutical industries, CompareNetworks, noted a common problem being faced by most of these companies. Increasingly large, globally distributed sales forces were making the timely distribution of product information, marketing collateral and demos difficult. They found marketing material was too often becoming obsolete in the time it took to be distributed. The rising need for more localized content and the constant need for material to be updated regularly, also, weighed heavily on a number of the companies.
Recognizing that companies were looking for ways in which to combat these issues and looking to improve distribution processes and better cater to their growing international audiences, CompareNetworks, seized the opportunity and conceptualized a solution that captured the interest of these companies.
Having successfully pre-sold the idea, CompareNetworks was now on the look-out for an innovative and reliable partner to work on it with. Working collaboratively with CompareNetworks to improve the concept, Calcey, was commissioned to provide technical support and design and develop the solution in its entirety.
Solution
imSMART, an interactive mobile sales, and marketing tool, that empowers sales teams with the most up-to-date material at all times, where sales people can easily carry out their operations by utilizing the power of inbuilt presentations, Groups, Content updates and Interactive tools.
Designed to enhance the sales process, imSMART has custom and unique features that offer analytics, sharing (users can share or print via email directly from the app itself) and engaging interaction through dynamic presentations, within the app itself. Integrating with tools most organizations already use, imSMART collects pin-point sales intelligence from its users’ activities and syncs this data with the company’s CRM, providing crucial marketing intelligence seamlessly. imSMART, thus, helps users streamline often complicated sales processes, improve the effectiveness of the sales pitch and enhance customer experience.
Calcey architected and designed the entire solution comprising of the mobile apps, the web-based content management system and the sync framework for providing real-time information to the mobile users. What started as an iPad application, quickly went beyond merely offering centralized collateral management to offer new value additions. Calcey integrated the solution with SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics and other popular CRM’s for lead generation, and content providers such as Celum for content management, Brightcove for video hosting and BazaarVoice, the rating platform. Today, imSMART also acts as a container allowing users to deploy custom HTML5 apps within it – a function that proved popular among customers who needed to deploy custom apps for marketing activations, trade shows etc. without going through the lengthy app store approval process.
Technologies: ASP.NET MVC/Web API, Microsoft Sync Framework, Entity Framework, Structure Map, SQL Server, JQuery, AWS SQS, S3, Omniture, Node.js, Angular 2, Ionic 2
Impact
Calcey has over the years supported the on-boarding of more than 40 multi-national companies to the imSMART platform, including global giants such as Genentech, Shofu, Lumenis, Carl Zeiss, Zimmer Dental and Thermo Scientific. Android and Windows versions have since been created to cater to a wider range of devices. In total, more than 70,000 sales reps actively use imSMART to manage their customer presentations.
Engagement
With an extended team, dedicated to their product within Calcey, a large part of the success of imSMART lies within the close relationship between the Calcey team and the imSMART team. Spanning over 5 years and nurtured over numerous visits by both teams to each other, the relationship has ensured that the best of imSMART was continually brought out and delivered to users. Calcey’s imSMART team, comprising of almost 15 personnel at its strongest, continue to proactively work on enhancing and improving the app and consistently go the extra mile to act as virtually an extension to imSMART’s own product development team.
Testimonial
The entire organization, from the CEO down to the most junior employee is focused and responsive to my company’s needs.
Jason Roy
Vice President – Mobile imSMART.com
