Dayton Parts Uses Salespal to Boost Their Sales Team's Efficiency

Dayton Parts is in the business of commercial vehicle truck parts distribution and leaf spring manufacturing. They use Salespal to provide their sales team with an easily accessible, always‑on‑hand library of marketing materials, brochures, and catalogs, as well as to simplify communications with partners and customers. Walter Sherbourne, Vice President at Dayton Parts, explains what drove him to look for a mobile solution:

I was a sales manager for 30 years before coming to Dayton to run their marketing department. We have over 26 product lines. Each product line we sell has its own catalog. These print catalogs had to be carried in our cars on sales calls, so when customers had a question, we had the literature to answer it. I wanted a way to make it simple for my team, that is, equip them with a device, such as an iPad or an Android tablet, with all the catalogs available there. I also wanted the catalogs to look exactly the same as the printed copies. The Salespal app gave me this solution.

We were looking for these features:

1. A way to better communicate the product offered to our customers
2. A way to provide our catalogs, technical bulletins, new product information, and sales tools in a format that allowed users (our salespeople and our distributors' salespeople) to quickly identify an item in the catalog or answer a customer's question by just looking it up in the app
3. A way for our distributors' sales teams to use our website during a face‑to‑face meeting with a customer
4. A way to keep our catalogs up to date (Print catalogs seem to go stale as soon as they are printed. Something always changes.)

Yes, I looked at other programs and talked with many programmers who could help us develop the app, but they did not grasp what I needed. Nor did they understand I wanted something I could manage without involving my IT department.

I wanted to provide our customers with printed and online versions of the catalogs and make switching between them easy. Also, it seemed that many other companies had an online format only, and I wanted the customers to be able to download an online catalog to their devices and use it offline.

With Salespal, we were able to upload and update our catalogs inside the app without having to involve anyone outside the marketing department.

I can name four key points:

1. Being able to upload the content without getting IT involved
2. Fast delivery of up‑to‑date catalogs and sales literature to our customers
3. Users being able to download the catalogs to their devices and use them offline
4. The reduction in overall costs of our printed materials

Salespal has given Dayton Parts a competitive edge as we now have a new format for delivering content to our customers. They get the most up‑to‑date catalogs or product information at their fingertips at all times in one place. Even when the content goes stale in the printed version, users see all the updates in the app version of the catalog.

Salespal has changed the way we go to market with our catalogs. There are some catalogs that are available only in the digital version now. So if one of our customers wants to purchase a certain product, the only way they can identify their needs is on the web or in the app catalog.

We launched Salespal in August 2015, and we now have about 3,000 users. They are our salespeople and our distributors' salespeople, who visit customers and end users every day.

We have had really positive feedback. People said that this was something they needed. One customer told us he couldn't believe we had accomplished what we had, as this was exactly what he'd been looking for. The app has made the job much easier in terms of helping sell our products in the markets he serves.

We continue to monitor the acceptance of the app through our user community and get very positive feedback. People actually cannot wait to see what we do next with this medium. We have also reviewed cost savings with the new Salespal catalogs. To date, we have saved over $30,000 in catalog printing costs.