Seeing Success with DiveTab Mobile Sales Solution

Johnson Brothers is a beer and wine wholesaler based in North Carolina. It has more than 13,000 customers, and employs more than 700 people in seven locations throughout the state. By acquiring other wholesalers over the years, Johnson Brothers has expanded its distribution territory to cover the entire state. As part of its 700-plus workforce, Johnson Brothers employs more than 200 salespeople and supervisors.

Johnson Brothers needed a mobile solution for its on-the-go sales team

For nearly two decades, Johnson Brothers has gained insight into its sales operations through Dimensional Insight’s Diver Platform (Diver), a business intelligence solution. With Diver, salespeople and their managers are able to access critical goal and quota data via web-based dashboards.

Several years ago, Johnson Brothers realized that it needed a way to bring this information to its sales team in real-time, meaning data needed to be accessible on the road via mobile devices. Johnson Brothersl was trying to settle on a solution, the organization had two decisions to make. First, what kind of a mobile device did it want its salespeople to use? And second, how could Mutual manage its sales information on the device it selected?

Johnson Brothers decided on iPads as the go-to device because of the stability and ease of use of the Apple iOS and the convenient portability of the iPad.  This meant it was a good compromise for a device the salespeople would be able to easily handle yet large enough to effectively display information to their customers. Johnson Brothers had all of its salespeople using the devices by early 2015.

Once it had the hardware in place, Johnson Brothersl wanted to provide its salespeople with more information. So Johnson Brothers focused on five main pieces of content.

The company wanted to:

• Distribute documents, forms, and price lists
• Distribute presentations that salespeople could show their customers
• Provide dashboards to show salespeople how they were progressing during the month in terms of meeting their goals
• Give salespeople the ability to do data analysis
• Share information with their customers

“That’s where DiveTab came in,” says Jim Staton, Johnson Brothers’ (Mutual of NC) Vice President of Information Technology. “Because DiveTab made all of those things possible.”

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How DiveTab helps Johnson Brothers increase sales

Dimensional Insight’s DiveTab is a platform for mobile devices and PCs that allows Johnson Brothers’ salespeople to download different types of documents such as PDFs, spreadsheets, Word documents, or PowerPoint presentations. For example, price lists can be downloaded, and they can be broken down into whatever metrics the salesperson needs — whether it’s a price list of NC beers, a promotion price list, or a price list for a specific market.

“We selected DiveTab because it supports both Windows and iOS, and it provided the ability to manage content,” says Staton.  “We didn’t have to worry about going out and getting another vendor in order to distribute documents–we could do all that through DiveTab, and at the same time we were providing the dashboard and data analytics portion.”

DiveTab also allows Johnson Brothers to do data analytics, which for the company is broken down into six categories:

• Goals
• Territory
• Quotas
• Customers
• Market Price Lists
• Today’s orders

A salesperson can use each of these sections within DiveTab to compare sales performance from month to month or year to year, to look at how a product from a specific region is selling overall, how items or sales are performing within sales territories, and which orders are coming through. They can examine how many customers a salesperson is taking orders for or how much money the company has taken in for the day. DiveTab updates the orders about once a minute, allowing the sales team to get that information almost immediately.

“The benefits of DiveTab are enormous all the way around. The salespeople have access to dashboards, as well as to documents, presentations, and some analytics that they didn’t have before,” says Staton. “For IT, DiveTab has provided us with a level of flexibility and the ability to rapidly deploy effective and scalable business intelligence.”

James Batchelor, who overseas Johnson Brothers’ Diver and DiveTab implementation, puts it this way: “We’ve been able to quickly and easily adjust the information our sales reps need, such as product authorizations for specific chain stores and near real-time detailed delivery information for each order quickly and easily. This increases the level of communication we have with our sales force while reducing the number of calls to the office. The feedback from our salespeople has been great.”