Success Stories

San Jose Surgical Supply Delivers What the Doctor Ordered With Pocket OrderWriter®

Overview

San Jose Surgical Supply is one of the largest privately owned physician’s supply distributors in the United States. With over 5,000 products, the company sells and delivers an extensive selection of pharmaceutical and consumable supplies as well as sells and services all major brands of equipment. San Jose Surgical has five store locations and an outside sales force of 25 sales representatives.

Challenge

As a company focused on customer satisfaction, developing customer relationships and providing a wide selection of products, the executives at San Jose Surgical wanted to strengthen the role and value the company provided each customer. The company was also interested in increasing their market share not only with existing customers but by adding new customers. To accomplish this, San Jose needed to change the way their sales representatives were taking orders and reduce their reliance on inefficient out-of-date methods.

The sales representatives have an extremely limited amount of time to speak with the physician’s staff, which makes every second count. Their sales representatives must be prepared with item information, prices, historic data, accounts receivable amounts and customer buying preferences. Unfortunately the current methods used by the sales force were too heavily dependent on paper and pencil and telephone calls back to the office. The process interfered with how the sales representatives used their time with the customer. Sales opportunities were missed along with mistakes in taking the order.

This business model also made it very hard for new sales representatives coming on board to be productive and not look foolish in front of the customer.

“In order to effectively leverage the changing needs of the business, San Jose Surgical needed a user-friendly order entry software solution that allowed our sales force to adapt to the changing market and be responsive to our customers without having to become computer geeks. Additionally the software had to work with San Jose Surgical’s existing back office software system,” said Joni Grace, IT Manager.

Solution

After considering several options, San Jose Surgical selected Access International’s Pocket OrderWriter (POW™) solution to help the sales force effectively interact with each customer and to take orders quickly and accurately. The key reasons San Jose Surgical selected POW (which runs on a Pocket Handheld PC) included its ease of operations; the breadth and depth of functionality provided; the attractive Return On Investment (ROI); and Access’ clear vision for the future.

From a tactical perspective, the sales representative now has the capability to target each specific customer with recommendations and answers that increases the loyalty the customer has with San Jose Surgical as well as increase the amount of business the customer does with the company. All of this happens at the touch of a button. Now the sales representative can quickly take an order so time can be maximized talking about new products instead of calling the office to get answers. POW enables the sales representative to access complete customer information, helping them to have a clear understanding about the customer’s buying history, needs, and current status. The sales representative can easily see the entire customer profile. Having the timely information at their fingertips helps the sales representative stay ahead of the competition and maximizes their relationship with each customer.

“We definitely exceeded our original goals. We have significantly increased sales productivity, raised revenue and continue to add new customers every month,” says Joni.

“POW has permitted us to leap frog the competition,” said Greg Guio, Sales Manager. “The way we were doing business prior to POW was very backward. Now all of my sales representatives can carry into the doctor’s office a small Pocket PC device in their front pocket and that one device gives the sales representative all of the information to do his job.”

Guio continues, “We also use POW as a selling tool to show prospective customers why they should do business with San Jose Surgical. POW really makes a difference.”