SIMAPP: Empowering sales & marketing teams of a global diagnostics provider

Challenge

For B·R·A·H·M·S Biomarkers, an entity of leading biotech company Thermo Fisher Scientific, FTWK developed an iPad sales app to support sales and marketing teams in getting out their messages in a more targeted and efficient way while always remaining compliant and up-to-date.

The client was initially looking to transform from their printed sales brochures and marketing materials to a simple PDF viewer app. The app was aimed to work as a personalised communication and information tool for their sales reps, allowing them to be more efficient and enhance sales conversations with their customers.

Approach

After the initial kickoff and briefing with the client, we conducted comprehensive research interviews and surveys with both sales and marketing teams. During the research, we discovered that sales reps needed in fact more flexibility to tailor their presentations to individual customers’ needs, while marketing teams had to make sure that any information communicated was always up-to-date and within the narrow constraints of compliance regulations.

For the marketing team, we set up a full backend that allows them to control and regularly update content in the App (currently over 2000 documents in 15 languages)

Getting constant feedback from users through interviews and usability tests as well as monitoring app usage with analytics helped us to make sure any new feature or function added during the ongoing development process was useful, understandable and easy to use for them.

Outcome

Besides providing sales reps with an easily manageable & portable tool for carrying all the latest marketing materials with them in all available languages, the iPad app enables sales reps to flexibly respond to their customers’ requests. More tools have been added to assist sales reps with being more efficient in routine tasks.

For marketing teams, it is easy to update content and grant regulatory compliance of all customer-facing communication.

Impact

As most of the time with digital transformation, working on and using the product has helped sales & marketing teams collaborate and communicate much more closely.

One and a half years into continuous development of the app, the majority of sales reps use it as their go-to-solution for researching and presenting marketing materials now, which has also helped to lower printing costs for brochures.