OrderPad Software

“We built a great system, but the salespeople refuse to use it.” That is an actual quote from a CIO who sat on a panel about sales force software at an industry event in 2008. I haven’t seen the system that they built, but it certainly failed because either the benefit to the salespeople was too low or the pain in using the system was too high. These aren’t absolutes, they are really a continuum which we refer to as the Pleasure and Pain continuum. It’s not rocket science; you simply need to make sure that the benefits to the users outweigh the friction the system generates for them, and if not, then don’t bother moving forward with the system because it will be a waste of money, time, and goodwill. The key to ensuring that the system provides enough benefits to the sales force is to get their skin in the game early on in the process.

One thing we know for sure is that salespeople perform better when they have fast access to information which enables better decision making and allows them to better plan for what they hope to accomplish during each of their sales calls. For that reason, one of our guiding principles when we first created OrderPad was that it must be ridiculously fast for users to access information on their customers and prospects. If it’s not fast, then it won’t be used (at least not be used to its potential). Therefore, using a PDA wasn’t an option because the idea of someone hitting “Next” and “Previous” a thousand times a day in an attempt to get to the information they seek wasn’t going to work.

As a general rule, Tablet PC’s have much larger screens than PDA’s which translates into more pixels being displayed. This allows us to present more information on the screen at one time which reduces the need for “Next” and “Previous”. It also allows us to use a portion of the screen for far easier navigation than a PDA would allow, which meant that the need for “Next” and “Previous” could be eliminated.

Last week we attended an industry trade show that several of our customers attended. They reminded me that OrderPad is more than just software – it’s a series of beliefs. It’s believing that proper execution by your field sales staff can have a major impact on all areas of the company; it’s believing that great sales people can perform even better if provided with the right tools; it’s believing that gathering information from the field and analyzing it at headquarters can be game changing – it allows you to test and prove new theories or disprove long held beliefs; it’s believing that providing information to those in the field can improve the thousands of decisions that are made in the field each day; essentially, it’s believing in people.

You may have noticed the dramatic face lift that our site recently underwent (ok, it was more like a transplant). I’d like to thank the team at Electric Pulp for the incredible job they did with the redesign. We couldn’t be more pleased.

For those of you not familiar with Electric Pulp, they are a small web development firm from South Dakota, brought to recent fame by Guy Kawasaki and his infamous ARSE test (I’m happy to report that I scored fairly low). Guy also hired them to build Truemors, the worst website ever, and said this about them, “Honestly, I wasn’t a believer in remote teams trying to work together on version 1 of a product, but Electric Pulp changed my mind.” We agree wholeheartedly.

Thank you for visiting our new web site and new blog. We will be writing posts about sales, technology, and most importantly about what is possible when sales teams use technology to achieve the incredible.

We look forward to the conversation…check back soon.