For workers in the field, staying connected just got easier. Dallas-based Spotio, a four-year-old company with a mobile platform, is designed to help in-office management track the outside sales activities of a company to uncover where its next customers are located.

Using mobile technology, the Spotio app connects remote sales workers with home bases. Moreover, it aids managers in making strategic decisions for their company at a faster pace than was previously possible.

“Spotio is an app that’s based on Google Maps to log visits to businesses and homes where sales reps have performed a sales activity. It takes less than two seconds to log activity after each interaction,” Spotio’s CEO, Trey Gibson, says.

Gibson explained that historically, field sales teams were expected to log their activity into a customer relationship management system (CRM) at the end of a long day. But with Spotio, a sales rep can log information in real-time—information that’s easily accessible for both the user and manager.

“Can you imagine spending eight hours out in the field working and trying to sell your product and then having to come home and spend another hour or two logging in that information into your CRM? How accurate do you think this information would be?” Gibson says.

“Spotio is an app that’s based on Google Maps to log visits to businesses and homes where sales reps have performed a sales activity. It takes less than two seconds to log activity after each interaction.”
Trey Gibson

With the click of a button, managers can access field date entry—what their team is doing, where they’re working, who they’re talking to—and a full history of the location with any notes previously recorded.

On the flip side, sales reps can organize leads and clients by color for a more visual pipeline, in turn giving them more time to sell rather than enter data. The app also offers additional services, including sales intelligence, appointment setting, lead management, and sales canvassing.

“What we have found is that few companies have a proven and repeatable sales process for their field sales team that generates net new business, because it’s so hard to get visibility into the activities that lead up to the sale,” Gibson says. “Spotio solves that problem by giving both the sales rep and the sales manager a path to success by understanding what activities lead up to the final sale and helping the team organize their day, week, or month in order to achieve these results.”

[Photo courtesy of Spotio]

In addition to tracking door-to-door businesses, Spotio tracks B2B sales, allowing field reps to be an estimated 46 percent more efficient with their time in the field. The unique B2B features include Google Places integration, territory management, route optimization, sales intelligence, and e-contracts. Because the application is geography-based, managers can also easily assign territories to sales teams.

The app’s creators were inspired by the findings of a survey aiming to solve a communication gap that has been historically prevalent in door-to-door sales operations.

Gibson says that as an outside salesperson himself, he knew there wasn’t any tools available that reps liked using or could give insight into management in the field. Most companies have a CRM, but they can tend to be clunky or difficult to use when making sales outside of the office.

“I set out to create an application that both the sales rep and sales manager would love using,” Gibson says. “For the sales rep, a platform that didn’t slow them down while they are trying to do their job, so one they could easily log their sales activity and notes as they went about their day and create appointments that would sync to their calendar. For their manager and management team, the visibility into what’s going on to create a level of accountability on both sides.”

Spotio believes that its data is 95 percent accurate, and its creators say users can trust the app to provide the most accurate information available on door-to-door or outside sales activities.

Spotio recently launched a new version

As for the future, Gibson is confident that the company’s revamped app is headed in the right direction.

The Spotio team took its findings from the past four years—from thousands of customers across dozens of countries—and combined it all into one new product.

[Photo courtesy of Spotio]

“This product is not only going to service our previous customers, but also allow us to go to more enterprise-level customers that have bigger requirements on things like integration data collection reporting,” Gibson says. “The future is as bright as ever for Spotio.”

Users of the app subscribe and pay monthly, with different pricing options available for different sized companies and users, ranging from $25 to $129.