[July 12, 2004] Involve Technology's New StreetSmarts Software Increases Sales for Companies with or without CRM PHOENIX --(Business Wire)-- July 12, 2004 -- Innovative, Sales Rep-Focused Solution Provides On-Demand Answers, Practical Advice & Best Practices 24/7 Involve Technology(TM) Inc. today announced its innovative new sales support technology called StreetSmarts(TM), a patent-pending 24/7 system specifically designed for companies with or without an SFA/CRM system whose primary goal is to increase the effectiveness of their salespeople. StreetSmarts delivers a completely different, yet complementary set of features and functions from SFA/CRM by providing a single source for salespeople to get immediate, deal-specific answers needed to help close more sales faster. It uniquely addresses and solves many of the problems faced by sales organizations such as: reducing the sales cycle, ramping new reps and increasing productivity of existing reps. StreetSmarts is available immediately as an ASP/hosted solution and priced per user per month. After a rigorous two-year period of development and refinement that produced strong sales improvements with real companies and hundreds of salespeople, StreetSmarts v3.0 is now being offered to the general marketplace. This powerful new sales support technology breaks new ground in feature functionality, intuitive ease-of-use, and a patent-pending process for gathering and disseminating information and answers such as the latest competitive analysis, most effective objection handling, best practices on negotiation and more. "StreetSmarts helped reduce the ramp-up time for our new sales reps by 60 days," stated Greg Malark, executive vice president of Helms Briscoe, the world's largest site selection and meeting services company. "Our 500 plus reps now find relevant information and sources much faster than in the past, which speeds our overall success as a company in moving the business forward." "Today's salespeople are under increasing pressure to answer more questions faster," stated Lisa Cramer, Involve Technology's president and COO. "Existing SFA and CRM solutions can't meet the demand and valuable time is lost searching through multiple information systems or calling people all over the company. StreetSmarts gets over 70 percent user adoption with our customers. Salespeople love it because they can ask questions and receive answers using e-mail, but mostly because it helps make them more money." StreetSmarts Features - Providing Info & Answers Not Available in Other Systems Single Source for Answers and Advice: Salespeople can now find answers and advice to all their questions and problems in one place. They won't have to look through multiple systems and contact multiple people. And sales managers and other experts won't have to keep answering the same questions over and over again. What's Working and What's Not - Rated for Usefulness: StreetSmarts provides immediate answers and advice with proven results about product knowledge, closing techniques, best practices, RFP answers, latest objections, most relevant presentations, customer responses and more. The advice is rated by others for its relevance and effectiveness and even includes other users' comments. Real-Time Access to Experts: If the StreetSmarts system doesn't have an immediate answer to a salesperson's question, the question is automatically routed via e-mail to a designated company expert in the subject area for fast response. Users can easily view the background, experience and contact information of any expert in the system. Retained Best Practices & Techniques: StreetSmarts captures and retains important information from various departments throughout an organization and allows it to be effectively utilized over and over again. This repository of real-world advice, techniques, materials, presentations, references and experience is a valuable company asset that shortens the ramp time for new employees and helps with new product introductions. Built-In Incentives: To stimulate maximum user adoption and rapid content generation, salespeople and others throughout a company are given points and incentives for contributing information, requesting information and even rating information for usefulness. Intuitive Interface/MS Outlook Integration: StreetSmarts looks and behaves like applications salespeople use every day. An integrated menu within MS Outlook allows users to query subject experts, seek answers and share advice. It features a powerful keyword search function, similar to Google and an overall Amazon-like user experience specifically designed for salespeople. Self-Managing - StreetSmarts is perfect for sales organizations as the system requires no IT resources and is up and running within weeks. Based on a rules-based back end, the system requires minimal resources to keep content fresh and supports a several month ROI. About Involve Technology Inc. Involve Technology is the developer and marketer of a new generation of sales support solutions that enable companies to increase their sales effectiveness by capturing, sharing and disseminating practical, deal-specific, proven answers to salespeople. The company's flagship product is StreetSmarts, a breakthrough in sales support technology which focuses the power of Involve Technology's thinking to help sales teams close deals more easily. Involve Technology's founders, executives and directors possess top-level backgrounds in sales, marketing, consulting, product development and professional services earned at industry-leading organizations such as Accenture, IBM, KnowledgeWare, Miller Heiman, SalesLogix and Viasoft. Each has been involved with the creation, marketing, and/or integration of technologies tied to the sales process, CRM, call center, training and other key business operations. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.involvetechnology.com or call 800-997-9098 in the United States or 602-953-7711 outside the United States. Involve Technology and StreetSmarts are registered trademarks of Involve Technology Inc. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]