Replacing brochures with 500 iPads saved one company $1.5m -- but that was just the start

Credit: iStockPhoto

Printing thousands of glossy product brochures and shipping them all over the nation was costing Maquet Medical Systems USA about $1.8 million a year.

The company needed to get details about its surgically-implanted medical devices out to doctors and medical facilities, but the costs had to come down, said Philip Freed, vice president of marketing for Maquet since 2009.

"I noticed we were losing a lot of money and not tracking ROI," said Freed.

Why JC Penney Employees Call Their iPod Touches "Libby"
CITE Goes Live! Register for the CITE Conference & Expo, June 2-4, in San Francisco.

The first step to cutting those costs was to find ways to improve the transmission of information to the doctors who needed to know about the devices, said Freed. For that, Maquet looked first at the BlackBerry devices being used by its sales people to communicate with customers and corporate headquarters.

The BlackBerry devices were great for corporate email, but they couldn't provide some of the features needed by Maquet sales people in the field, such as the ability to display on-the-fly video presentations to always-rushed doctors during brief sales calls.

"We started looking at surveys which showed that most health care technicians had already moved to iPhones, so we wanted to use what they use," said Freed. So in 2009, Maquet began to switch more than 500 users from BlackBerry devices over to iPhones. Two years later, those same sales people were given iPads for their work.

Soon, a second light bulb flashed on, said Freed.

"We were spending, between shipping and printing charges, about $1.75 million a year on paper and shipping alone so that sales reps could show things to customers," said Freed. Those glossy and labor-intensive brochure mailings cost lots of money to produce and ship out, and often the salespeople didn't even hand them out -- they would just sit in the trunks of their cars.

That's when Maquet began looking for apps that would allow them to show the old paper-based brochures digitally. The idea was that by showing the contents of the brochures in a dynamic way using video and audio, sales reps could demonstrate and display the company's medical devices in real-time, while qualifying their sales leads in person.

Freed began a brief search and found a suitable app from Prolifiq Software, which allowed Maquet to animate and digitize its sales brochure into a presentation that attracts attention and instantly delivers its messages to its clients. Freed also looked at modules offered by CRM companies, but chose to go with Prolifiq because it best fit their needs, he said.

Since moving to Prolifiq for presentations on iPads and iPhones, Maquet now spends only about $300,000 annually on brochure printing and shipping, according to Freed.

So what did the company do with the first year's $1.5 million savings? That was easy – it more than covered the iPads and iPhones Maquet bought for its sales force. "It paid for itself."

With the iPads and iPhones in the hands of the company's sales team, Maquet then began looking at creating a group of new apps that could help extend the use of the devices in other ways in the constant hunt to find efficiencies and increase sales.

"We wanted to save money on more than just paper," said Freed.