The iPad Sales App Revolution
by Glen Emerson Morris

For over a century now it's been common for salespeople to have to carry a substantial amount of sales literature and order forms with them as they traveled. In addition to being a burden to carry, the sales literature was expensive to print and went out of date quickly and often. Just mailing updated catalogs to a few dozen salesmen could cost hundreds, updating a large sales force with new catalogs could cost thousands. In addition, providing salespeople with a way to process orders has also been expensive in terms of both infrastructure and labor.

Not surprisingly, several companies have developed iPad applications designed to combine both the catalog/sales presentation capability of the iPad with the order processing capability already available in the iPhone. The goal was to create an iPad app that would be all any salesperson needs to take with them on sales calls, and it looks like the developers have pulled it off. Granted, these are first attempts at this type of software, but the concept is sound, and we owe it all to the iPad.

The iPad was the first device that really delivered on being an acceptable replacement for the traditional sales brochure. A visit to any Apple store will prove this point. There are no product brochures for individual Apple products at Apple stores. Instead, there's an iPad running a multimedia presentation for that product. And if you decide to buy an Apple product, the Apple sales person rings up the sale, and swipes your credit card, through a sales app running on their iPhone.

Giving every salesperson in the field an iPad that can make a multimedia pitch for the product and handle the purchase “paperwork” is essentially a no brainer. By the end of 2012 thousands of companies large and small will be giving iPads to every salesperson in the field. We're seeing the emergence of a major class of business applications evolve because of the iPad. We don't even have a name for these apps, but it's already certain these new “sales assistance” apps will change the way sales are made as surely as the Mac changed the way advertising is produced.

Like any new class of applications, it will take a few versions to get the feature sets and quality right, but it won't take more than a year or two to see really robust and stable sales apps. Both the catalog and purchase software have been around for years, they just haven't been integrated and ported to the iPad platform before.

In their simplest forms, sales apps will provide a simple catalog and purchase processor. The more complicated versions add extensive search capability, credit card processing, auto syncing with the home office, and integrated customer resource management software.

The iPad sales apps currently on the market usually fall into two categories, they're either spin-offs from larger e-commerce services ported to the iPad, or they're completely brand new apps that were developed specifically for the iPad. Deciding which type of application you need will in part be determined by what kind of system you're currently using.

If you're already using a catalog application/service, a compatible point of sale app may be available from the developer. The iOrder app from the makers of iCatalog is a very capable order processor, and it integrates very nicely with iCatalog.

If you're not using a catalog app/service like iCatalog you might want to consider using an integrated app like iPO Mobile or Handshake. Creating the catalog to be displayed on the iPad is relatively simple. iPO Mobile allows you to load catalog information into an Excel spreadsheet that is stored in an online dropbox iPO provides. The iPads in the field can by synched to the catalog in the iPO dropbox any time the salesperson connects to the home office.

One of the really cool things iPad sales apps will make possible will be the ability to closely monitor the success of new iPad based sales campaign. A company with a sales force of 100 people might launch an iPad based sales campaign with 4 different sales pitches, each assigned to 25 salespeople. At the end of the first morning of the campaign, each salesperson's results were sent in to the home office, the most successful of which was determined and all iPads in the field were updated with that campaign.

The feature set of future iPad sales apps reads like science fiction. Eventually, the apps will use the iPad camera to read the potential customers face, evaluate their reactions and custom tailor the presentation accordingly. Even now, the wireless connectivity of iPads could allow records to be generated on what particular presentation worked with what type of customer, and the results shared amongst the entire sales force in real time.

In the future it will be common for businesses to provide wireless guest access for visiting sales people to print or download catalogs, and also to use large screen projectors to stream the iPad presentations to a large number of people. Most businesses have this capability, or could easily acquire it. and they probably will

The iPad sales apps have an irresistible feature set. They make doing business more efficient and less expensive, and that's always a winning combination of features for an app to have. True, it may cost a bit to equip every person in a company's sales team, but the payback could just be a matter of months for company's that have to update high quality limited run catalogs often. It's impressive, but there's even more to come.

This is just the beginning of the iPad life's cycle as an advertising tool. Many more advertising applications will evolve for the iPad, some not yet even dreamed of at this point. We plan on being there to cover the whole story.

Beginning with this issue, The Review will be running a New Products Gallery every month featuring announcements of new iPad apps and other tools for the advertising and marketing professional. We will also be running product reviews on a regular basis in this column. We invite you to join us.


Glen Emerson Morris was a senior QA Consultant for SAP working on a new product to help automate compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley law, an attempt to make large corporations at least somewhat accountable to stockholders and the law. He has worked as a technology consultant for Yahoo!, Ariba, WebMD, Inktomi, Adobe, Apple and Radius.