By Scott Meacham
Copyright © 2014, The Oklahoma Publishing Company
When a team of seasoned sales executives sets out to help their customers increase sales, the sky’s the limit.
4DSales, a Tulsa firm founded by executives who have lived and breathed sales throughout their careers, provides a mobile sales application that lets companies help their sales reps close more and larger sales.
The app runs on the iPad and Windows 8 tablets.
i2E recently led a $500,000 funding round in 4DSales, which included a $250,000 investment from the StartOK Accelerator Fund.
With 4DSales, a company can easily store and navigate all its sales collateral — brochures, photos, catalogues, PowerPoint presentations, technical data sheets, product specifications, and even videos — putting material at sales reps’ fingertips anywhere, anytime.
This increases the time sales people can be out in front of customers instead of creating PowerPoints, but the most impactful result is that 4DSales combines ease of access with the power of visual presentations to create a shorter sales cycle.
“Clients absorb so much more when we are demonstrating something visually,” said Brian Carpenter, 4DSales CEO. “Salespeople close sales by showing solutions. That’s the beauty of 4DSales. Through visuals, salespeople gain customers’ attention and create conversations that produce sales.”
In today’s fast-paced business world, a salesperson may get 10, 20, maybe 30 minutes at the most with a prospect. Reps must be nimble and prepared to go in the direction a prospect wants to go — not fumbling through materials looking for the right information.
With 4DSales, reps can switch dynamically between visual material, based on the prospect’s interests or needs. They don’t need to bring a brief case full of brochures. They always have the most professional and current material right at their fingertips, which helps prospects make quicker decisions.
“We’ve taken all the complexity out of the interface between the material and the salesperson,” Carpenter says. “4DSales amplifies the skills that the sales people already have.”
i2E continually coaches entrepreneurs on the importance of solving a problem for customers with solutions that offer a quantifiable return on investment.
What’s really striking about 4DSales is that the return on investment comes primarily from increased revenue.
Growing the top line is something that every CEO and business owner wants — whether the company is as global as Microsoft or as local as a landscaping business in central Oklahoma.
4DSales already serves dozens of customers in Oklahoma and nationally. These customers are serving hundreds of their own customers.
Several of them talk on www.4dsales.com about how their sales have increased.
That’s the ripple effect of innovation.
That’s how entrepreneurship creates jobs in Oklahoma and brings wealth from other places into our state.
Scott Meacham is president and CEO of i2E Inc., a nonprofit corporation that mentors many of the state’s technology-based startup companies. i2E receives state appropriations from the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology. Contact Meacham at [email protected].
Did You Know? According to research from the Wharton School of Business, 67 percent of people say that presenters who use visual tools are more persuasive.
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