Customer story: Bailey International

How Bailey International Moves Product Catalogs to Mobile Devices for Their Customers and Sales Reps with Salespal

Bailey International (Bailey) is an innovative American manufacturer and distributor of mobile hydraulic components. For over 39 years, they have been providing the mobile hydraulics industry with high quality standard and custom products at competitive prices.

Challenge

For decades, Bailey utilized printed catalogs as the main marketing tool to communicate product information and sell products to their customers.

Our printed catalogs were the main source of product information, and our customers used them to place orders with us. They would take a catalog, find the item they needed, and call us to place an order.

However, the industry gradually moved from print to digital. Bailey developed a leading ecommerce website, but they couldn’t abandon the system of ordering via catalogs, as that was the preferred order method for a large portion of their customers. Needing to bridge the gap between digital and print users, Bailey started to look for a way to create e-catalogs for their customers.

With FlippingBook, Bailey successfully began to display digital product catalogs on their website in 2014. Around 2,000 users per month were accessing the digital catalogs, but Bailey felt they needed to go further and provide their catalogs to both their sales team and their customers on mobile devices.

We saw a tremendous spike in ecommerce sales via phones and tablets, and that was our motivation to go with the new format. The accessibility of the catalogs via a smartphone – both offline and online – is a powerful tool for our sales team and our customers. It eliminates the need for print.

Search for Solution

When the Bailey team began looking for a solution that would help them go digital with their printed catalogs, it was important for them to find a tool with excellent navigation that was cost-effective as well as easy to use and maintain. Luckily, FlippingBook Salespal could offer them what they needed.

I was able to experiment with the demo: I put some content into FlippingBook Salespal and could search for items easily. That sold it for me.

The ability to download the PDF and individual pages was also important. Bailey’s customers requested PDFs quite often. With Salespal, they could download a page, print it, mark it up, decide what they wanted, and email the company instead of placing the order over the phone.

Solution

Right now, Bailey uses their app as a sales tool. Their sales team has 14 people in total, and all of them use the app to some extent. During their meetings with customers, they can pull up a catalog on their mobile devices and navigate around them easily with a convenient search tool and a table of contents. This allows them to discuss any product with their customers without delay.

Once a customer watches a sales person use Salespal, they can then do it themselves, too. This kind of mobile app is something new for the industry, so we feel that the end users need a little bit of training and guidelines. But once they see it in use, they like it.

Another important change for Bailey is the ease of maintaining and updating their catalogs. With Salespal, they can fix any mistakes and update the content in a matter of minutes, preventing the information from going stale.

I publish an update to our catalog at least once a month. So if there’s an error, instead of having thousands of dollars tied up in printed materials, we can just publish that update digitally and then communicate it via email to our customers.

Results

Bailey is quite happy with their digital catalogs and with Salespal. Face-to-face communication with their customers has become much easier, and keeping their catalogs up-to-date is also simple. Just recently, the company created an app for Google Play in addition to the one in the App Store. Bailey is quite optimistic about both apps.

Now that we have a Google app, we’ll go forward and definitely market it more, and get even more use out of our digital catalogs.