At a recent PRSA meeting I met yet another Twitter friend in real life: Lennon Patton, Regional Director of Catering Sales (and marketing genius) for Jason's Deli. Lennon shared with me a unique use for his check-in app: sales accountability.
Lennon checks in at places where he prospects for business and also places where he delivers food. He uses this information for himself, as a history of where he's been, and also for his boss. I think Lennon's idea is ingenious. It's a simple process and serves as both a historical call sheet and an effective way to ensure you are maintaining consistency and variety in the businesses you serve. (Example: if you look back over the course of three months and find that you are visiting the same ten businesses, it's time to expand your horizons).
Kyle Golding, marketing wiz for Comtech Direct Mail Solutions, (also involved in our discussion), commented that this would serve additional purposes by advertising the places you work with, plus contributing to their online marketing efforts by boosting their brand's visibility.
Additional benefits:
- check-in apps as call sheets make the process fun and easy (instead of mundane and tedious)
- simple sales accountability for yourself
- even if you don't do much face-to-face prospecting, you still network and visit clients (don't you?), it's a great way to make sure you are getting out from behind your desk
Of course, we discussed the ability for an unscrupulous competitor to trail your every move and call on every customer you work with but we all agreed it would be futile (and, frankly, none of us really cared).
Before my chat with Lennon, I had a hard time understanding how check-in apps would be beneficial for a B2B, sales and service business. Like most things social, the benefits aren't always obvious. As I'm getting older (and hopefully wiser) I'm adopting tools at a slower pace until I understand how they can be adapted to serve my needs, an evolutionary discovery that, with patience, usually works. (Besides, the proliferation of new gadgets and tools is overwhelming, just try keeping up with the daily articles in Mashable, TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb).
The only question for me remains: Which check-in app to use? Which one do you use?
(If you are new to check-in apps, a. k. a., location based social networks, here's a primer on facebook's places).
Image credit: Mark Fidelman
