Mobile Preselling

Mobile Preselling is a system supporting the operations of sales representatives. Its primary objective is to automate sales operations and boost their effectiveness; moreover, it supplies up-to-the-minute as well as historical market data to the managerial personnel. Mobile Preselling (based on hand-held devices) handles two-way data transfer between the head office and sales personnel operating in the field. It can be effectively used for the various areas and levels of business management - from operations to strategic planning. It is provided in several functional versions (by sectors); currently, the system is used by both the sale representatives' networks of FMCG producers, distributors' sales developers, merchandisers, representatives of pharmaceutical and telecommunications businesses.

For the managerial staff, the implementation of Mobile Preselling guarantees a constant inflow of information on price levels, effectiveness of promotional campaigns, competitors' offer and potential of individual outlets or sales channels. What is more, the system enables a detailed objective setting for sales representatives and analyses their operation performance in many dimensions. As regards field sales forces, the system offers on-the-fly access to current and historical data on specific customers and to information on the level of execution of individual sales plans. In addition, sales representatives have the option of generating and sending electronic orders and using provided analytical tools.

With Mobile Preselling at hand, the time of data upload to the head office is significantly reduced. In optimum conditions, all information (both market and commercial) should be arriving in the head office no later than the following day (from the moment of feeding data into the system and replicating). Middle managers, previously required to manually enter data received from the sales representatives, can economize time and tackle more strategic activities like planning and control of the team's activity.

Mobile Preselling is delivered as a ready-to-use, mature application that can be parametrized and tailored to individual client's needs. It is an open system that enables thorough integration with the company's existing systems (e.g. sales, finance and accounting). Individual system modules can handle various data sources (text files, spreadsheets, relational databases, etc.).

System structure

Mobile Preselling supports data flow between two system clients: Mobile Preselling Server and Mobile Preselling Client. The Mobile Preselling Client module is run on Pocket PC devices. Having one at hand, the field user records orders and market information and forwards it to the central server via a two-way data transfer (replication). The Mobile Preselling Server module allows the managerial staff to maintain control over data recorded by the field sales forces in the mobile component of the system or retrieved from the company's central IT system (during the process of integration). By means of Mobile Preselling Server, the head office determines tasks and objectives for individual representatives.

The adopted communications solution consists in equipping each sales representative with a properly configured mobile device. With the help of the Mobile Preselling Client application, the sales representative uploads data into the central system and in return downloads any needed information. Each user is obliged to periodically connect to the central server and transmit information to a relational SQL database.