“An integrated, mobile tool to boost collaboration... and sales”

The Matermaco Group is a Belgian company with bases essentially in Belgium and North Africa. Experts in the sale of vehicles for the farming sector, parks and gardens and industry, they market and represent a wide range of leading brands. Their Belgian salesforce, made up of 15 sales representatives, uses the SmartSales mobile app for iPads to boost their sales cycle, as well as to encourage collaboration between the different sales teams.

Consolidated collaboration

The search for a new tool dedicated to sales dealers began when Benoit Strauven became CEO of the Matermaco Group. As soon as he took on the role, the director took the time to ask his employees about what they needed and expected from the company. Alain De Roeck is the man responsible for Matermaco’s IT department. He worked alongside Benoit Strauven at every step of the research process. “We realised that the information linked to a client in our department X was not always known about by department Y,” explains Alain De Roeck.
So they started to look into a CRM tool that would allow them to centralise all information about clients, for all departments. Most importantly, this data needed to be available to all the sales teams.

« I had known about EASI since it was created. I was thrilled when I found out that they offer a mobile CRM system »

“Before SmartSales, our sales representatives used a CRM programme that we had made ourselves. It only worked on laptops. We could copy over details entered during the course of the day, but this required a VPN connection. So updates were automatically delayed. This wasn’t always very efficient. We found SmartSales through our own research. I had known about EASI since it was created, so I knew that I could go to them to implement a quality CRM solution within the group.”

“Soon after we first got in touch, the SmartSales team came to present the solution to us. We quickly realised that certain functions would need to be adapted for us. For each adaptation, we talked to the team to find out whether or not it was possible. The EASI team kept its promises and continued to be really flexible in terms of the adaptations we wanted to introduce.”

An “à la carte” solution

Visit reports, orders, presentations, CMSs... Alain De Roeck was keen to use all the functions offered by the app. “It was all so tempting! However, we realised that certain functions wouldn’t be very useful for us. So we chose the most relevant functions, “à la carte”, to suit our needs.”

The success of the “visit report” and “CMS” functions

“We use the “visit report” function a lot. CMS too, for an overview of the vehicle stock and day-to-day addition of back orders to our system. At a glance, our employees can see what vehicles we have in stock and look at orders and presentations.

A change that was quickly embraced by the team

For ‘new generation’ sales reps, especially those who are used to tablets, there have been no problems in terms of using the iPad or the app, which is really intuitive.
Alain De Roeck: “In the first few days, we had a few small issues with a few salespeople who were not so used to handling iPads... We are aware that change can sometimes be a cause for concern, so we were prepared for that”.
After training key users within the sales team, it all went well. Users trained each other, and helped one another when necessary.

Easy to use, intuitive and flexible

Alain De Roeck admits, “I’m not a big fan of mobile apps or tablets. But SmartSales turned out to be really easy to use, right from the start”.
In no time at all, the sales directors started to see the value of such a tool, which generates usable data. “We split the country into regions, with each of these regions being associated with a salesperson. To hone our strategy, I developed a programme that lets you see the information collected thanks to SmartSales.”
This programme shows you where each sales representative is on Google Maps. For a given period, their manager now has a clear, accurate overview of their latest visits. The directors use this data to adapt their strategies when certain geographic areas are neglected.

Consolidated collaboration between sales representatives and managers

The contents of visit reports are also extracted from SmartSales for a better follow-up between the manager and their sales representatives.
“Using data automatically extracted from SmartSales, I also developed a programme to view all the visit reports for a sales representative for the previous week. For each salesperson, the manager has an overview of the comments and information connected to each visit. The ideal tool to take stock of and discuss what has happened during the past week.”

Win-Win

The app encourages the development of sales strategies, while also making life easier for sales representatives. “Our teams no longer have to cart their laptops around from one meeting to the next. Working with just one tool, the iPad, saves them a lot of time: generating details, GPS accessible directly, customer relations history, presentation tool... all that, in just one mobile device!”

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