Case Study: Small and Mid Size Businesses Get Mobile

Most small business owners understand the value of marketing tools such as Mobile CRM but assume that such technologies are only accessible to the much larger corporations. However, as smaller businesses gain experience with CRM they are demanding to leverage the power of these tools outside the traditional office computing environment, explains Mobile CRM specialist Christian Wettre

These days, small businesses need solutions that are flexible and can change quickly as the business grows while requiring little or no IT support staff to keep them running and available.  Small business solutions should fit into existing often simple computing infrastructure without the need for investment in new servers and IT management and security technologies.

 Small businesses rarely standardize on specific mobile phone platforms and are often looking for solutions that can work on a variety of mobile phones already in use by their staff.

 Often, small businesses have few or no dedicated IT support personnel to maintain systems and need solutions that do not require constant attention and administration to support existing and new users. The wMobile Mobile CRM product has had notable success because it meets these small business needs. It’s ability to be installed on any existing Windows 2000 or 2003 server means it is available for use on all major mobile phone platforms such as BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm and iPhone.

CASE STUDY: A.L Wilson Chemical Company. Kearny, NJ (www.alwilson.com)

A.L. Wilson is a family owned business that designs, manufactures, and markets textile stain removal products.  Their products are sold through an extensive network of distributors in the United States and Canada. A.L. Wilson employs regional sales managers who are responsible for distributor relationships.

Fred Schwarzmann Jr.  President of A.L. Wilson was an early adopter of CRM for central customer management and felt that these tools should also be easily available to sales managers even if they were constantly travelling in their sales territories. Sales managers were required to submit call reports of interactions with distributor and customers as well as to maintain a product price book and take orders from both distributors and customers during visits. Mr. Schwarzmann felt that laptops were a cumbersome tool for someone always on the go and started researching options for how sales managers could better utilize the then rapidly increasing computing power of mobile telephones.

A.L Wilson purchased wMobile in 2005 and it was implemented without the need for any additional IT equipment purchases and without the need for any additional IT resources. Training on the system was accomplished within a few hours and users immediately adopted it as their sole CRM tool in the field.

To ensure adoption A.L. Wilson customized the product to directly reflect the sales processes in place.  A.L. Wilson sales managers makes joint sales calls with distributor representatives and take customer orders while on sales calls.  A.L Wilson arranged to customize wMobile so that it could easily record such joint sales efforts and so that users could log orders and confirm product pricing directly on their mobile phones.  Since the wMobile product uses a direct internet connection to the A.L Wilson office network all entries and orders were available to office staff in New Jersey immediately as the sales manager made the entries into wMobile.

Mr. Schwarzmann realized that the mobile phone market was changing rapidly and appreciated that since wMobile supported all mobile phone platforms, A.L. Wilson did not have to commit to a specific type of phone service but would be able to always enjoy the state of the art in such devices as they added value to the sales force.

As a result of the wMobile deployment, A.L. Wilson has greatly reduced the time to sales managers spend on administrative tasks and reduced the time central office staff spends on recording and confirming orders.  Since all information in wMobile is in real time the remote sales managers have 24 hour access to current customer information and product pricing.  Since the maintenance of mobile phones does not require IT support there are little or no IT related costs of providing CRM functionality to remote users.

Field reps no longer needed to generate and submit paper orders,daily reports and weekly summaries for their field activities, since the raw data was available centrally and the summary work carried out at HQ using Crystal Reports. This was particularly popular with the field reps.

A.L. Wilsons’s Fred Schwarzmann Jr. comments “wMobile delivered a solution that previously only existed as an envisioned desired state of affairs.  We were able to deliver a cost effective and meaningful CRM tool to our users that it has proved to have minimal IT carrying costs and a high return on investment during the three year since deployment.”

A.L Wilson they now introducing a programme to leverage some of the value of the wMobile technology back to the distributor field reps they work with. By generating summary reports using Crystal Reports which highlight the ‘New’ products placed for evaluation during a trial session. The distributor field reps then use these reports as a reminder to follow up on these trial product placments when they revisit the customer two weeks later. The results so far have shown a significant number are reordering  through this simple reminder process facilitated by the wMobile system.

The future marketplace for mobile CRM is shifting and we will see many more businesses adopting mobile CRM solutions a much smaller scale. As we have seen, many wMobile clients have already replaced the need for notebook PC’s and reduced the organizations ongoing support needs as well as initial costs.

It is an exciting time for the wMobile and the message is increasingly reaching smaller businesses that mobile CRM solutions are entirely accessible and obtainable. There is a definite fit between the requirements of a small business and the benefits that mobile CRM can bring to their operations.