There was just one hitch. It turned out that GO was using the video to attract investors. That's all there was -- just a video, no product. "I had never heard of anything like that," says Mandelbaum. "In our business you deliver -- very quickly -- what you show." But there was nothing usable from GO, and nobody else offered anything comparable.
Mandelbaum and Porter had to cool their heels for nine months before they could get a prototype from GO and start developing their first version of Pen on the Road, as they dubbed the envisioned software. But within months it was clear that GO as a company had pretty much, well, gone. Windows was too entrenched among software developers and customers for GO's operating system to get a foothold.
Although Porter and Mandelbaum were set back several months, they found that Windows could work with pen-based systems, and by 1993, Pen on the Road Version 2 for Windows was completed. It ran on a laptop computer equipped with a special pen for writing on the screen -- there was no mouse or track ball. With a bar-code scanner attached to the pen, a salesperson could swipe the pen scanner across a clothing sample tag, handwrite order information on the screen, and then pass the pen to a buyer to sign the order.
The first RuggedWare customer, of course, was Karman. But instead of thrusting the software at the entire sales force, Mandelbaum and Porter selected three reps for a brief pilot program. To put the software in its best light, they made sure that one of the reps had a fair amount of computer savvy. And to build credibility among the most computer shy of the sales force, they chose computer novices to be the other two pilot reps. The three pilot reps were trained for one week and sent out with their laptops for a high-pressure field test. They returned with glowing reports for the other reps. "We let them sell one another, rather than relying on us," Porter says.
The rest of the sales force was quickly equipped with laptops and given four days of training. "It was done in kind of an onion layer," says Porter. "First, we told them only what they needed to know to get their basic function accomplished, to write an order. When they were ready for more, we taught them how to get in and out of the system. The goal was never to teach salespeople how to use Windows." Once trained, the sales force was turned loose on the customer base in a sink-or-swim rollout. Mandelbaum claims that wasn't a big risk compared to the alternative. "We couldn't have gone through another season the old way and survived," he says. Not only did the reps survive, they prospered. Any resistance quickly evaporated.
Having conquered Karman, RuggedWare needed to win outside customers. The clothing business was the target market because it was the industry Mandelbaum and Porter understood, and it was the market the software was designed for. But the two also recognized that what suited Karman perfectly might be a rough fit for another company. So they made the software modular. A "general apparel footprint" module provided 80% of the basic functions needed by any garment company's sales force; a customization module tailored the system to meet company-specific needs for reports, graphs, and memos. Instead of marketing a generic package or having to write a new system for each customer, Karman can "tune" Pen on the Road to each customer's needs. Even the on-line help text can be customized to reflect a company's policies and procedures.
From their own experience, Mandelbaum and Porter knew that companies in the market for big software systems often are afraid . . . of time overruns, runaway budgets, and painful transitions. To lower customers' resistance, the two decided to guarantee a negotiated price and time frame -- typically about $8,000 per user, including customization, hardware, and training -- and 60 days from first meeting to delivery of the complete system. What's more, they would help customers set up a pilot program and would provide all the training. It added up to a big promise, but, after all, they had done it for their own company.
Mandelbaum and Porter demonstrated Pen on the Road at trade shows, but their biggest marketing tool was Karman's sales force. The two decided not to try to sell executives on the benefits of the system. Instead, they let Karman's reps spread the word to other reps. They wanted enthusiasm for the system to bubble up from the field. So far, the strategy has paid off: RuggedWare has already landed its first two customers and has placed 51 units in the field. Mandelbaum and Porter are projecting a breakeven year, with revenues of $1 million, and expect that figure to jump to a profitable $2.5 million in the coming year.
Now Mandelbaum and Porter are gearing up to increase RuggedWare's offerings. At the top of the list is a "marketing encyclopedia system": software to help gather, prioritize, and make use of the flood of information that salespeople encounter, which includes company voice mail, memos, E-mail, trade journal articles, and even tidbits gleaned from the Internet. Explains Porter, "Sifting through this stuff takes a tremendous amount of time away from the sales process." The system will work in much the way the Internet routes information of interest to particular salespeople -- by setting up "subscription lists" based on the type of information each rep wants.
After that, the two want to expand RuggedWare by selecting a second industry ripe for sales-force automation. To help provide the industry expertise the company will need to build a second general footprint, says Mandelbaum, RuggedWare will probably look for a partner.
But the plans could change. After all, what if someone shows Mandelbaum a video about 3-D virtual-reality goggles?
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Peggy Noonan (pjnoonan@aol.com) is a freelance writer based in Denver. She writes about science and health issues.
