Last week, we had a demo of SMS access to Impel CRM data to a prospective FMCG customer. They had a high-powered team including their Head of Sales, Head of Marketing and Head of IT present. As part of the demo, we showed them how a salesperson could add an order via SMS. When the SMS-added order showed up in the CRM system within seconds, I swear you could hear their jaws dropping and hitting the table. 

And within seconds there was an excited babble of conversation of how they could cut their order entry cycle time from over 24 hours to less than 5 minutes. How they could cut out a sequence of paper order from customer, faxed to headquarters, then entered into their system by hand into a single SMS entry made directly into the system by the salesperson on the field. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation that they did, revealed that they could cut their order entry cost from Rs 28 per order to Rs 4.50 per order. 

And with SMS being available everywhere from Jhumritalaya to Anantnag to Port Blair, they thought that this would be the most cost-effective way for their field sales people to access Impel. 

It was great to see such enthusiasm. Our next challenge - getting this message out to everyone that can use it!!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 4:25 pm and is filed under General stuff, Impel OnDemand, Marketing and Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.