Case Studies

Liqui Moly - Skynamo Sales App - Skynamo.com

Team Skynamo — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 22:00:00 GMT

About Liqui Moly South Africa

Liqui Moly is a well-known lubricants and automotive additives brand with a strong presence in South Africa’s retail and workshop market. Just as their products are designed to reduce friction, protect engines, and keep machinery performing at its best, their sales team needed the same kind of support. Not for engines, but for the day-to-day field sales work of managing visits, orders, and customer relationships on the road.

Atlas Oil - Skynamo Sales App - Skynamo.com

Team Skynamo — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:00:00 GMT

How Atlas Oil has built a high-performance sales team with Skynamo

Atlas Oil has been a trusted lubricants wholesaler in South Africa for over five decades. Based in Boksburg, Gauteng, the business represents some of the biggest lubricant brands in the country. Through hard work and integrity, it has built a reputation for reliability, strong customer relationships, and long-term industry expertise.

Healthbridge - Skynamo Sales App - Skynamo.com

Team Skynamo — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 22:00:00 GMT

Using Skynamo to target customers more accurately

Skynamo isn’t just a tool for managing sales reps, says Robert Delport, inland sales manager at Healthbridge. In fact, the healthtech company uses it much more for market intelligence and streamlining their sales process.

Healthbridge has been in the industry for more than 20 years, and started off as a traditional switching company, Robert explains: “We’d send a claim to the medical aid, and then deliver a response back to a medical provider – we were in fact the pioneer of the real-time claim,” he says. “Over time we’ve moved to a cloud-based clinical and billing system, so we offer an electronic medical records (EMR) system that integrates seamlessly into the billing component of our system. In layman’s terms, that’s a medical practice’s accounting system.”

Robert says when he joined the company more than 10 years ago, they were using Excel spreadsheets to drive their sales processes, and in the process of changing their own offering to be cloud-based, decided to move to Skynamo, so they were practising what they preached on the sales front.

“We were doing it the old-school way,” he says. “Old-school selling, old-school pipeline building, old-school leads management, and paper diaries. We decided to make the leap to Skynamo in 2015.”

Robert says their team has a national footprint, and comprises 13 business consultants, two sales managers and a tier of administrators, as well as a national sales manager. “We have our own sales methodology that helps us manage our pipeline and forecasting, which is driven by our customised Visit Forms in Skynamo. We have tweaked Skynamo to match our sales process and how we would go to market and sell.

“Our team has over time refined our sales approach to ensure that it more consultative in nature,” he explains. “Through this process we’re able to help a practice quickly identify the value that Healthbridge can add. Skynamo helps us measure the unique interactions that our team has with each practice (and consequently work out our closing ratios). When reviewing the reports, our team leaders can quickly understand where an excessive number of visits are being logged and we can quickly intervene, as we don’t believe in wasting the practice’s time.

"Seeing our team’s activity means you know how you can help drive the team form the most productive behaviours. My job is to upskill, mentor, coach my team and find the correct tools to support them."

Robert Delport
Sales Manager

He says Skynamo also helped to address a few inefficiencies within their standard process, in replacing the spreadsheets and other physical paperwork, and gave them visibility into where team members were from day to day. “We’ve also homed in on the ideal type of client profile we want to target,” he says. “Skynamo helped us to target the correct client, and to maximise on activity.”

Robert says that because Skynamo allows team leaders to see who has logged in, and where they are at any point, they can help their team members structure their days better. “Seeing our team’s activity means you know how you can help drive the team form the most productive behaviours,” he says. “My job is to upskill, mentor, coach my team and find the correct tools to support them.

“Because it’s a sales team, they are very driven. So it’s about how I make their lives easier and faster and how I can find ways to take the pain out of admin. They say sales guys don’t like admin. But trust me, my best sales guys actually do their admin. It helps that Skynamo automates a lot of it .”

Robert says that since they started using Skynamo there’s been a definite uptick in the number of visits their consultants get through, and the saving on daily admin has been a huge boon. While their consultants are engaging with prospective clients, they complete the admin, which is kept as simple as possible – about 15 questions with pre-populated slots that just require a drop, drag and click action. “They can complete a form in under a minute,” he says.

Robert advises to bear in mind that there will be a good deal of change management required when Skynamo is first implemented. “You have to drive the behaviour,” he says. “As a sales manager, we mostly look at the reports – at the numbers. And our admin people keep tabs on the dashboards and send prompts to remind people to log in, for example. It does require some management to embed the behaviour and ensure people are using it as intended.”

Cave Direct - Skynamo Sales App - Skynamo.com

Team Skynamo — Sun, 14 Aug 2022 22:00:00 GMT

How Skynamo helps reps to do more of what they do best – sales!

Cave Direct is a family-owned importer and wholesale distributor of speciality and craft beer across the length and breadth of the UK. Pubs, bars, restaurants, bottle shops, web shops and even supermarkets are part of the approximately 5,000 customers the company supplies – anyone involved in the hospitality trade, essentially.

“We have exclusive breweries that we import under contract, so Paulaner, Kona and Lervig are exclusive to Cave Direct. These are accompanied by a brilliant range of beers from America, Europe, Scandinavia as well as a UK range” says Laurence Smale, the company’s Head of Sales. “We have about 250 products that are permanently available, and then another additional 100 to 150 rotational beers that come in every week.”

That large cohort of customers is serviced by a sales team of just 12, 11 of whom are in the field, and a national accounts manager who deals with larger groups. “They each look after a region, so we’ve got one in Scotland, Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Wales, Bristol, the West Midlands, two in London, one in Essex, one covering Southeast, and then the home counties as well. They’re all across the whole of the UK,” he adds.

Cave Direct was introduced to Skynamo by its Acumatica service providers. “When Skynamo first arrived in the UK, they said there was this really hot plugin we could use for Acumatica,” he recalls. “And the main thing for us was being able to integrate with the systems that we currently had. Once we were presented with what Skynamo can do, we were pretty sold.”

Laurence says a major selling point was the potential reduction in daily admin they could foresee. “The team have so many different conversations in so many different accounts that it’s key for us to find out what’s being spoken about, what’s working and where. So, to be able to input that information on the fly was vital, because by the time you got back to the office, a lot of the time you’d forget about half the stuff you’d spoken about during calls.

“Also, for the team to have all the sales and stock data when they’re out on trade was key. We have such a fluid operation in terms of beers coming in, customers signing up and conversations to be had, that they need that information as and when they’re out and about.”

This was Cave Direct’s first experience of a mobile field sales app; before Skynamo they had only used Acumatic for CRM, which was all desktop based. “Come four or five o’clock, you’d have to load up the laptop and try to input everything that you’ve been speaking about, so this was much easier,” says Laurence.

Having the ability to input data on the go allows reps to focus on selling, he says – a key consideration for the team. “If you’re a field rep, nine times out of 10, you don’t like being sat at a desk,” he says. “You’d rather be out and about, talking to customers. And then for the managers, it’s allowed us to get an overview of what’s happening out in the field, which really helps to structure the conversations we have with the team.

“We have all the information at our fingertips, and it’s a conversation of sales support, as opposed to questioning why something hasn’t been done or what’s been going on. You have the information before you go into a meeting, which is great.”

Another useful feature is the in-built reports, he says. “We use them as much as we can. We don’t currently have a sales call frequency report on the team. But we obviously look at where they’ve been going and what accounts they’ve been going into. There are also a couple of bespoke reports that we’ve tried to get off the ground, which we’re currently working on.”

Implementation has gone as well as can be expected, he adds. “We’ve had quite a personal connection with the Skynamo team in the UK. And obviously, being in such a people’s industry, we are people’s people. So we would like to speak to someone – an actual person. They were great in the setting up of Skynamo, and to have that personal touch has been great. And then the ongoing training with the online portal has been a real help to get any questions answered from the team pretty quickly too.”

"And the main thing for us was being able to integrate with the systems that we currently had. Once we were presented with what Skynamo can do, we were pretty sold."

Laurence Smale
Head of Sales

Of course, when there are changes, there’s always some resistance, but Laurence says how you manage the process can help to smooth things over. “Some people thought it was going to be a Big Brother-like system, and that we would be tracking them, but we just need all the information from the trades,” he says.

“So, again, how we structure our conversations is around asking how we can make this better. Or, if we notice something is happening at a particular client, we can offer help. So it’s more of a sales support, rather than coming down on the team and saying, ‘Why haven’t you done 50 calls a day?’ Obviously there were some questions at the outset, but on the whole it was well received.”

Skynamo has allowed the team to focus their conversations, he explains, so they’ve seen growth in terms of their core business. For this they use the forms section quite a lot. “We have win-and-loss forms, customer complaint forms, new brewery line forms… And that’s really allowed us to get a real oversight of the trade and see what’s working where and why it is or isn’t. So in terms of communication, that’s been a great help.”

It’s also helped to get better coverage of customers, Laurence says, because when you’re looking after 500 to 700 customers in a particular area, it’s easy to lose sight of who needs some attention. “It’s just a good, gentle reminder that you haven’t seen a particular customer in a while, and you need to pop in,” he says.

Coming out of Covid-19, he adds, Skynamo helped them to canvass their customers through forms and surveys so that they could forecast what they needed to order from the breweries, which helped them to keep a tight grip on the whole of the trade and their customer base.

Laurence concludes by saying that Skynamo’s personal touch extended beyond onboarding to helping the company to get through the pandemic. “They shared information on how other people were using Skynamo, which was a great help, and then obviously shared how we were using it with other customers, which was a nice touch.”

McNab’s - Skynamo Sales App - Skynamo.com

Team Skynamo — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 22:00:00 GMT

Skynamo helps with increased sales by identifying the gaps.

McNab’s was founded in 2000 by Rupert McKerron, who wanted to help other people overcome chronic tiredness as well as protect themselves from the harmful stresses of modern living, as he had done to cope with his own chronic fatigue syndrome.

“So we make good-for-you, functional foods, drinks and supplements,” says Nobesuthu Sibanda, the company’s sales support manager.

McNab’s products can be found in large retailers and pharmacy groups such as Clicks, Dis-Chem, Shoprite and Checkers, but the in-house team only handles Spars and Pick n Pays across the country – the rest of the sales activities are outsourced.

Still, it’s a smallish team, given the number of Spars and Pick n Pays they must cover. “We have a team of seven reps nationally,” says Nobesuthu. “We have four in Gauteng, one in the Eastern Cape, one in the Western Cape, and one in KZN.”

"It’s easy for me to get the reports that I’m looking for. Everything is at the click of a button..."

Nobesuthu Sibanda
Sales Support Manager

Skynamo has been part of the McNab’s set-up since 2017, when it was still known as Honeybee. Nobesuthu wasn’t working in sales at that time, but recalls that one of the managers introduced it to McNab’s.

She says the major benefit it delivers for them is keeping track of sales activity. “Before, we had to rely on every invoice from the reps,” she says. “After they took an order, they had to send us a slip, and a picture of what they’d done, to be captured. Basically, it was a lot of manual work. So the idea was to automate that.

“There was so much unnecessary admin,” she says. “You spent a lot of time typing up smaller stuff, when you could be applying your brain to something bigger, something greater, instead.”

She says that as a back-office user, she finds it very easy to use. “It’s easy for me to get the reports that I’m looking for. Everything is at the click of a button,” she says. “And it’s also easy for me to see where my guys are driving to in terms of route deviation, so I can see if people are following the route. I can see if there any issues arising.

“It’s made the reps’ lives easier too, because the history that Skynamo keeps makes it easier for the guys to remember what happened the last time they visited the store,” she says. “It helps them to keep tabs on things, and it also reminds them if they have tasks they need to do.”

One of the reports she finds particularly useful, she says, is store sales history. “It provides a picture to our team, and shows us where there are gaps – and that helps us to increase our sales, because it highlights where we need to focus.”

Bidvest Prestige Cleaning - Skynamo Sales App - Skynamo.com

Team Skynamo — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 22:00:00 GMT

Integrate Skynamo with your CRM and ERP from the start for best results!

Bidvest Prestige Cleaning, based in Windhoek, Namibia, is a provider of all kinds of cleaning services to a variety of clients. “We do contractual cleaning services or once-off opportunities in various industries,” says general manager Nathan van Wyk. “We’re in healthcare, we’re in retail, we’re in commercial. We supply labour, usually with the appropriate equipment and consumables, but some clients only want the labour.”

The company has been using Skynamo for four or five years, and it’s used by a team of five sales staff, spread out across Namibia.

“All of our reporting used to be manual,” Nathan says. “So I didn’t have access to actually see what the guys were doing unless they submitted some type of, you know manually written or typed report. I wanted to see the daily activities. And then I wanted a tool that could allow them to spend less time in the office. Skynamo gave that to us.”

Nathan says there was some resistance to the app at first, but it wasn’t unexpected. “Some had the feeling that they were being policed, which is probably quite common. But I think most of my reps have adapted to it. The challenge for me was to get them to understand that it’s not a tool that I use to police them, it’s a tool that we use to record client interactions. And the big goal of us using the system is to grow revenue and to retain our customers.”

He’s had to demonstrate, he says, that it’s a tool designed to help them, not manage them.

"I think, to get the most out of Skynamo, integration is vital for any business, because if you don’t manage your data on Skynamo, it becomes a bit of a challenge..."

Nathan van Wyk
General Manager

For management, he says, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag because Skynamo has not yet been integrated with their ECRM or ERP. Recently, however, he says, Steiner South Africa has gone over to Skynamo too, and they’re using integration, so he can see the benefits. “I’m forward to going to that next step, because I think integration will untap a lot more potential and information that we can use to improve our business.”

The lack of integration means that Skynamo is not currently saving them a lot of time, because quotes are still done separately, and reps come back to the office to do that, he says. But he says he can see that it has a positive effect on sales revenue from the point of view that he can track activities and immediately talk to reps who are under-performing and help to get them back on track.

“I would say our retention of our clients has also improved, because I can see when my guys aren’t getting to clients and rectify that,” he adds.

“I think, to get the most out of Skynamo, integration is vital for any business,” Nathan concludes, “because if you don’t manage your data on Skynamo, it becomes a bit of a challenge and then I think when you’re trying to report on it and look at analysing data, becomes a bit of a challenge.

“So I if I had to restart four years ago, I would do integration from the beginning. It would have made life a lot easier for me.”

Profumi D'italia - Skynamo Sales App - Skynamo.com

Team Skynamo — Wed, 19 Jan 2022 22:00:00 GMT

Skynamo makes the backroom stuff easy so the sales team can focus on selling!

“I think everybody should use Skynamo. I was thinking that even with my friends, I would like to put my friends on a call cycle, so I don’t miss out,” jokes Yvette Rowland, national sales support manager at Profumi D’Italia. The company, a family-owned business that is the exclusive importer and distributor in South Africa of Bottega wines and spirits, among others, has been using Skynamo for almost three years, and is delighted with the results.

“We also import and distribute the Voga brand, and we’ve just recently started with Santo Stefano, which is a Russian apple bubbly brand which we’re also distributors for. So it’s quite a different range of products,” says Yvette.

Products are distributed to restaurants and liquor stores across the country from the big chains right down to smaller, independent bottle stores. Yvette’s team is made up 12 salespeople on the road, one telesales-person, and one administrator, and they are spread across Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban.

Yvette says when she started with the company three years ago, they were already subscribers to Skynamo. “But they weren’t really using it to its full potential,” she notes. “They had two users on the system. And the only person who was using it was the admin person.”

One of Yvette’s main functions when she started at the company was to implement Skynamo and get the sales team running more efficiently. “The team was running around a little like headless chickens, just calling randomly on customers, and they would focus on the customers that gave them regular business.”

Yvette’s previous experience was in the vehicle tracking industry, so she had an understanding of how the GPS tracking would work on Skynamo. In her previous company, they had also used the Microsoft Dynamics system for CRM. “But it was a very complicated system,” she says. “They have a lot of reports, but it’s complicated to implement and the staff didn’t really buy into it.

“The contrast, using Skynamo, is like day and night,” she says. “Everything that was difficult on Microsoft Dynamics was just so easy on Skynamo. What also made it easy to use was the Skynamo call centre. At the beginning, I would phone them maybe five times a day, and they would always be happy to help me. The support is brilliant.”

When they started, Yvette told the sales reps they’d be using Skynamo to do their sales reports – the activity they like the least. “At first they said they didn’t have time,” she says, “because I think they didn’t understand how to use the system. But Skynamo runs fantastic free training sessions, so everyone went on those, and when they saw that it literally takes two minutes to do a report on a customer, they changed their minds.”

The app on their cell phones has improved their ordering and delivering processes enormously, she says. “Previously they would go into a store, and then have to WhatsApp or email the orders when they left – which meant typing out all of that information: the quantities and the product name, and they’re all Italian… If you are dealing with a query, how do you begin to find that? You’d have to go through all the WhatsApps and emails.

“Now, everything is at the touch of a button. While you’re in the customer’s profile, with one click you add the order or the quote and everything is pre-set on the system. So all you need to add is the quantity and in which region the delivery must come from – where the warehouse is. So it takes less than a minute to do an order.

"Because things happen faster, there’s more time in the day to see more customers. Before Skynamo, the reps were seeing at most eight people a day. Now I’ll easily see 11 to 14 visits a day. It’s phenomenal."

Yvette Rowland

National Sales Support Manager

“And now the order is pulled through automatically because we have an integrated system. So invoicing happens immediately, and it goes straight to the warehouse – all within minutes – and the warehouse has the instruction to deliver.

“Because things happen faster, there’s more time in the day to see more customers. Before Skynamo, the reps were seeing at most eight people a day. Now I’ll easily see 11 to 14 visits a day. It’s phenomenal.”

Yvette says this is also partly due to the improved ability to plan routes and get to under-served areas. “There were clients in certain areas that weren’t buying from us,” she says. “They had purchased from us in the past, but had become dormant accounts on the system. And the reps actually didn’t even know that they existed.

“Now, when you look on Skynamo on the map, you can see little dots of every customer in your vicinity. Your own customers or maybe other reps’ customers. So if you’re in a certain area you can see that there are 15 clients in close proximity, for example, and if you work hard, you can see them all before noon, because it’s in a concentrated area. So from a productivity perspective, it’s been really, really helpful.”

Admin time too, has been saved – at least 90 minutes a day per rep, says Yvette. And it’s so much easier to communicate and follow up on queries now that no one needs to trawl through emails and WhatsApps to find the trail of what’s been happening with a particular customer. “Now everything is streamlined onto one platform, so it’s a one-stop shop,” she says. “We also save anything important onto a customer’s profile – like an important email where a price is confirmed, for example. So if you go into a customer, all the information is there, so there’s no miscommunication.”

She warns against using Skynamo to micro-manage staff, saying that instead it can be a great motivational tool. “So I always say to them, when they write their report, they must’nt think it’s so I can micro-manage them. The report is written in case somebody else goes to the same customer tomorrow – it just gives an overview of what you’ve done on that day.”

“And if a rep leaves along the way, when the next person comes, they can just click on the history, and browse through the information to see where you are with this customer, what have you discussed and who have you spoken to.

“It keeps them professional and accountable. If a customer says they promised something, I can go and look on the system and see what was discussed.”

She adds that Skynamo has really helped through the pandemic – even during the hard lockdown. “Everybody was stuck at home, and we weren’t allowed to leave our houses, and of course the liquor stores were closed, but we used that opportunity to do more personal interactions with clients, since we couldn’t go to their stores. We could just touch base with them, and once we could visit the stores, it was a great help. It really made us improve our customer relationship management all round.”

Finally, she reiterates just how efficient and effective the call centre is. “They have a wonderful follow-up system,” she says. “You log a call, and get a ticket immediately, and you are told it’s been allocated to a certain person – and you always get a response. They’ll phone you or email you, and then you get an email to say the ticket has been closed off or been resolved. And even if you phone them and sort things out telephonically, they reply on the email with notes on what was discussed. Not once, in all the time I’ve used it, has the system failed. It really has been brilliant.”

James Ralph - Skynamo Sales App - Skynamo.com

Team Skynamo — Thu, 16 Dec 2021 22:00:00 GMT

Skynamo brings a “positive motivational cycle” to sales teams

As the authorised distributor of CASIO consumer electronics for the Southern African region, James Ralph (Pty) Ltd is responsible for distributing CASIO calculators, watches, and musical instruments, among others, to South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho, Mozambique, Eswatini and Zambia.

As CASIO distributor they supply and service major retailers, independent dealers/resellers and wholesalers, with a sales team of eight people across the country, as well as agents in Namibia, Mozambique, Lesotho and Botswana.

Director Robbie Frade says Skynamo has been on their radar since it was called Honeybee, but it was only in 2020, when the pandemic struck that the company started looking at Skynamo more seriously. “We realised that the majority of our workforce couldn’t work remotely for the simple reason that they just didn’t have the technology at hand,” he recalls.

As company they prefer systems that allow for efficiency and focus on customer service, especially within the busy seasons. “Skynamo has given us the complete pleasure of having a smooth and hassle-free order process where orders are imported and move through the system in the fastest way possible,” he says.

“To give you an idea, during previous busy sales season (before Skynamo) we used to have a backlog of about seven days to complete orders. We had lots of manual processes where our sales team still had to write out orders by hand and then manually send orders to the invoicing team for processing.

“The invoicing team would then print out the received orders and re-capture the order manually within Syspro.
When you have a sales team manually sending orders every day, then a backlog is inevitable, so there was always that hurdle that we had to get over during the busy sales season.”

With Skynamo in place, however, they are able to collect, process and dispatch an order on the day it is received. “For us it was a complete game-changer,” he reflects.

Robbie says implementation was quite a bit of work but the Skynamo integration team was a great help to guide them in the correct direction from the start. “We did the customisation and some cosmetic changes live,” he says. “Instead of trying to get everything perfect, and then launching the Skynamo solution to our sales team, we decided to set it up to a point where we could start using it, and then iron out the errors and bugs, and fix things as we went along.”

He points out that it’s extremely difficult to get a system 100% ready in a theoretical sense, because only once you deploy it do you see more useful solutions to your specific needs. So it took six or seven months to really bed everything down. And it was well worth it.

“As it stands right now, we have very little to no backlog on invoices and orders,” says Robbie.

He adds that as with anything new, there was a little pushback from reps when Skynamo was first implemented. “It was new, it was different, it was a change and as social creatures, we like comfortable situations. We don’t like it when we are pushed out of our comfort zone,” he says.

“As it stands right now, we have very little to no backlog on invoices and orders.”

Robbie Frade

Director

“Even I found this to be quite a big change to adapt to. But my focus was on the vision for the future – on improving efficiency, improving delivery lead time, and improving the most important thing: customer service. Those are the three most important elements for us.”

The other major benefit of Skynamo, he says, is transparency between the sales team, the invoicing team and management. “To give you an example, what the salesperson will see on Skynamo is exactly the same as what product managers will see. If a sales rep has done an order, the invoice is completed at our office and it’s sent to the warehouse so that the order can get dispatched. If the customer calls the sales rep a day later and asks where the order is, he or she can look on the Skynamo timeline to recall the invoice number – because our courier system is set up so that the waybill number is actually the invoice number. And then it’s easy for the sales team to call the courier or go on their online portal and track the delivery,” he says.

“The sales team can see stock on hand status, and so can product managers. They can see all the orders that they’ve done for the day, week or month, and so can management. We can see all the invoices the invoicing team have completed for the day, and the sales team can see their individual invoices completed for the day, week or month. Everyone has the same information. There’s very little ‘broken down telephone’ going on.”

Robbie says this has helped them to drive sales more as the sales team can see exactly how much stock is left of all items and with low quantity items it becomes ‘fastest fingers first’. “This has motivated the sales team to be a little more detailed in their ordering, which in turn has become a healthy motivational cycle for the sales team,” he says.

They’re also using Skynamo’s forms as a feedback mechanism about the situation in stores. “It’s almost impossible for a product manager to get to every single customer, so we need to rely on feedback mechanisms to give us the information that we need,” he says.

“The sales team uses Skynamo forms for instore product photos, of displays and merchandising, and then load comments for each form. As soon as a form has been completed and sent, our product managers receive the same information.”

Jayed Products and Services - Skynamo Sales App - Skynamo.com

Team Skynamo — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 22:00:00 GMT

If efficiency and productivity are what you need – Skynamo can help!

Four or five years ago, the team at Jayed Products and Services were first exposed to Skynamo through a vendor they distributed for.

“They wanted us to handle distribution for them, and they were on the Skynamo platform,” says director Jamie Binsbergen. “Since we were calling on their clients on their behalf, in a sub-distribution type of arrangement, we used Skynamo too. We were using it the way they had it set up, but we could see the benefits. So, when that contract ended, we brought it into our own business, starting in a very basic form and growing into it over time, where today it encompasses our whole business. We run our whole team around it now.”

Jayed Products and Services is a distribution company that deals in FMCG and consumables to the retail sector. The business began as a distributer of digital consumables, mainly to Spars and independent retailers, and over the past 20 years has grown into further digital lines, popular household lines and many food and health lines. They service about 200 Spar retailers, hardware chain stores, cash and carry’s, and many smaller independent retailers like garage shops, butcheries, and small independent retailers.

Their sales team comprises seven in-house salespeople and four independent contractors in the Western Cape, with the Johannesburg team covering Gauteng, Limpopo and Mpumalanga too.

It’s a small team, with a large footprint, which Jamie says is exactly why they needed Skynamo, previous paper-based systems would never have given the efficiencies now allowed by Skynamo.

“The main reason we were using paper-based was because we had been exposed to field software in the past and it was extremely cumbersome,” he explained. “And it was that thing of, technology’s fantastic, but we work on time as well. You get guys that write extremely smart software, but they’re not retailers, so they don’t always understand how much time some of these processes take in the field. We were losing huge amounts of calls a day. And we went back to a paper-based system based on that.”

There are huge benefits to be gained from using Skynamo for any business, he says, “but I think the best benefit is for small businesses. Generally they won’t have access to this amount of power at that kind of cost. Big businesses can afford tailor-made systems, which we can’t. All of a sudden, we could compete with the efficiencies of the big guys with a fairly low-cost software.”

And compete they have. In the four or five years they’ve used Skynamo, Jamie says they have doubled their turnover. “Skynamo is definitely a massive part of it, because our whole business is run through Skynamo, which links to our Sage financial system,” he says. “Those two systems run our whole business.

“Obviously, nothing replaces sound business practice or great staff, but Skynamo has given us the tools to put this all together very efficiently and affordably. These efficiencies in our processes would not have been possible without Skynamo – I can definitely give them credit.”

He says when new salespeople join the team, they are immediately wary, worried they will be policed. “But the thing is, if you’re doing your job, you don’t have a problem with it,” Jamie points out. “We see it more as a coaching tool – because the transparency on the app helps us to see why someone is failing, so we can help them before they lose their job due to a lack of performance.

“What’s nice is everyone’s got access to the information. So, we’ve got a merchandising manager who can sit and check stores from within the office. If there’s anything that we’re not happy with, we can place it on that person’s Skynamo calendar, which will tell him what needs to be fixed on his next store visit. He, in turn, also captures a whole bunch of data when he’s in the store, which comes back to us. So, we all have access to the same data. And we’re all feeding that data all the time.”

Jamie Binsbergen
Director

“If one of our team members is failing, then we are failing as a company,” he continues. “So, if you are a purposeful slacker, you’re not going to survive in my business. But if you’re a guy who works hard, we’re going to assist you, and we’re going to make sure that you win. We have the data, we can see where you’re going wrong, and we’re going to help you.”

Just recently, he says, they noticed that one of their staff members was working until 6pm, and it’s against company policy to cut into people’s family time. “Before we might not have noticed that,” he says. “This guy was battling, so he was putting in the extra hours because he obviously didn’t want to lose his job. So, I called him, and we worked out a way to help him. If you’re fair about it, it is there to make sure the whole team’s working well. But it’s also there for us to understand if our team is struggling, so that we know about it early.”

He says the team have found Skynamo easy adopt and use. Jayed provides in-house training, and within a week, people have the hang of the app. When they first started using it, he says, they phased it in slowly.

“We started with Skynamo as just an order system, to get rid of the old paper-based clipboard system. The guys processed their orders, and the orders were sucked into Sage. Previously, when a guy walked out of the store, we would have to wait for him to come into the office to hand all his paperwork in before we could process it. So just that efficiency was great – now when he walks out of the store, that order is in Sage five minutes later, ready for processing.

“I had a full-time person that would just sit and capture orders. So, when that job didn’t exist anymore, we could use that person somewhere else in our growing company. But we saved an entire staff member in those efficiencies. And then picking and packing could happen five minutes after the sales rep walked out of the retail store, rather than having to start packing that order the following day. So, the efficiencies are definitely hugely improved.”

Team communication has also improved, he says: “What’s nice is everyone’s got access to the information. So, we’ve got a merchandising manager who can sit and check stores from within the office. If there’s anything that we’re not happy with, we can place it on that person’s Skynamo calendar, which will tell him what needs to be fixed on his next store visit. He, in turn, also captures a whole bunch of data when he’s in the store, which comes back to us. So, we all have access to the same data. And we’re all feeding that data all the time.”

The team’s admin burden has also been reduced. “It’s removed a lot of duplication,” says Jamie. “An order is placed once, and no one is altering that data.”

Finally, he says, one of the biggest benefits is the integration between Skynamo and the company’s financial system. “I think if you use the two separately, the benefits are not nearly the same,” he says. “But as soon as you integrate the two, it makes a huge difference to the efficiencies of your business.”

Form-Scaff - Skynamo Sales App - Skynamo.com

Team Skynamo — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 22:00:00 GMT

Skynamo gives managers better visibility and reps less admin

When Form-Scaff wanted to have a better way to check the effectiveness of its sales strategy, Skynamo turned out to be the solution.

Form-Scaff hires and sell scaffolding and formwork to customers ranging from big construction firms to small builders, and has a team of about 48 sales reps, plus internal sales staff. “But we all regard ourselves as glorified salespeople,” says Darryn Jacobs, Form-Scaff’s regional manager for Gauteng.

Darryn says Skynamo is used across its 19 branches in South Africa, but not in its other branches elsewhere on the continent. “We were looking for an option that could help to confirm how effective our sales teams are,” he says. “And we needed to save time.

“We had a system, an old system on Excel, which was a very post-call sheets kind of set-up. So the guys would come in on the Monday or Friday afternoon, and flood their call sheets on an Excel document. And they would obviously then be in the office quite often, and we wanted them out there into the field.

“So I researched it and I looked at the various options out there. And I liked what Skynamo could do.”

The company started using Skynamo just before lockdown began in 2020, and apart from wanting to save time, also wanted visibility into how the sales force was performing.

"It’s freed up time to visit more customers – we’ve seen substantial increase in calls."

Darryn Jacobs

Regional Manager for Gauteng

“If you look at a region like Gauteng, it is very small but dense, and as management, we were concerned that we were maybe not getting to every corner of Gauteng,” says Darryn. “One way Skynamo has been able to assist us there, is to show us where we are getting to, and where we aren’t. So we started here in Gauteng, as a pilot project, and it worked quite well.”

Darryn said the response to introducing Skynamo was mixed. “I’ve got guys who’ve been here for many years and guys who are new,” he says. “Some of the people who’ve been here for a while were resistant to it in the sense that they would forget to put it on in the mornings at first. It does also use a lot of data, which some people complained about.

“But I think over time, it got easier and grew on people, and I started getting compliments from guys who’ve been here for a long time who are pretty stuck in their ways, saying it was making their lives a lot easier.

“I think it helps that they don’t have to use a diary anymore. Everything’s recorded in real-time now. So the old-school way of diaries, where you have to fill out a page and then fill things in on the Excel document a week later – when you’ve forgotten what happened – is all gone,” he says.

“Now it’s all live, and there are functions like being able to record what you were doing at a particular site, and then get back to it later when you need to remind yourself.”

Darryn says being able to see where various reps are at the click of a button is extremely useful. “We have the most basic package, and it doesn’t talk to our ERP system, so at this stage it’s more of a GPS tool for me,” he says.

And of course there’s the time saved on tedious admin. “With the old system, updating Excel probably took a good hour or two every week,” says Darryn. “If you multiply that by four weeks in the month – per salesperson – that’s a lot of time saved. Now they can just do it on the go, in front of the customer.

“It’s freed up time to visit more customers – we’ve seen substantial increase in calls. When the guys first used it, we were looking at maybe two customers a day – which is still feasible, since we’re a project management kind of business. But now we’re up to six to eight a day.”

Finally, Darryn says, it’s useful for the reps to take photographs on their site visits. “Each time a guy goes there, he takes a different photograph, so I can see the progress. And it’s stored in the cloud so we can always go back and look at those photos again.”