Equip Jan/San Sales Reps With Tablets And Smartphones

How does your company use tablets or smartphones?

We use smartphones for route tracking, connectivity to email and overall enhanced communication.
— Mark Melzer, President, NASSCO, New Berlin, Wisconsin


All of our sales staff are provided with smartphones, and most of our sales team use tablets. Through our company DropBox we download manufacturer’s videos, training tools, cost calculators, Maintex product literature and more. We find the tablets are convenient to carry and increase information for customer presentations.

Smartphones are the easiest way to familiarize the sales staff with emerging technology. Our phones have become so many things to us in our daily life. They serve as our GPS and mapping device, weather forecaster, camera, calendar, phone, texting and email center, clock and sometimes a game center. They offer connectivity to online ordering and immediate order confirmations.
— Linda Silverman, President, Maintex, City of Industry, California


Many of our salespeople and internal support use tablets for reference or selling aids, and some for order generation. Some salespeople smartphones enabled with apps, but not many due to the sizes of the screens.
— Jim Smith, Executive Vice President, HP Products, Indianapolis


1. Salesreps uses smartphones and/tablets to access our ERP system for info related to their customers, orders, inventory, cost, shipping info, sales numbers and margins via an application that runs on any smartphone or tablet.  Salesrep can setup alerts to monitor margins, b/o, shipping info.
2. Delivery drivers uses smartphones to make deliveries, route directions, capture signatures, provide delivery status to office, take a picture of deliveries, which can be tagged to orders, completed deliveries can be transmitted over the air to be updated in our database (and this information will be available to users throughout our network.)
— George Abiaad, President, Royal Corp., Santa Fe Springs, California


They utilize them just a little bit as our software provider is revamping their “app” to make it more user friendly. Our distributor salesreps currently remote in and can access the system and enter the orders. The smartphones allow them to get their information much faster.
— Eric Cadell, Vice President of Operations, Dutch Hollow Janitorial Supplies, Belleville, Illinois


H.T. Berry utilizes smartphones and tablets to a large degree. Especially tablets have become a big part of our sales and market strategy for quick one-one presentation where laptops are not efficient.
— Chris Nolan, President, H.T. Berry, Canton, Massachusetts


We currently use smartphones, not tablets. Each member of our sales team has an iPhone or similar device. We use these to communicate with customers and suppliers via phone, text and e-mail.
— Andrew S. Parker, Vice President, T. Frank McCall's Inc., Chester, Pennsylvania


High Point Sanitary Solution's salespeople use tablets for order entry that connect with our software server as this is the only application available with our software provider at this time. Our salespeople use them for sales and training presentations as well. As our software supports more features we will be using them for every aspect of the operation that utilizes software. Tablets are smaller, lighter, easier to carry, quicker to boot, have a longer battery life, and advanced enough to do full presentations.

Many of our suppliers are creating apps that simplify doing business with them or have pertinent sales materials at our fingertips. With Remote Desktop features, we can access computers at anytime without lugging around a laptop.
In addition, smartphones are a must for us and we make sure all salespeople have one.
— Scott Uselman, Manager and Director of Sales, High Point Sanitary Solutions, Houston


Dan Weltin is the editor-in-chief of Sanitary Maintenance and Contracting Profits