Customer story: Hubbell Power Systems

How Hubbell Power Systems Creates Digital Catalogs for their Customers with FlippingBook Salespal

Hubbell Incorporated is an international company whose history began more than a century ago. Hubbell houses over 70 well-known and respected brands, and has offices in four countries with 16,000 employees in total.

Hubbell strives to provide their customers with high-quality, dependable products and welcomes innovations that help the company remain a market leader in the manufacture of electrical, lighting, and power products.

Challenge

Most of the communications with customers at Hubbell Power Systems (HPS), one of the groups of Hubbell Incorporated, are aided by product catalogs. As of today, the catalogs are the most reliable and up-to-date source of product information, vitally important for the HPS salespeople.

The company used to provide their teams with catalogs in two formats: print and PDF. With print, the sales reps had to carry about 100 catalogs with a total weight of more than 500 pounds whenever they needed to have all the information on hand. And using PDFs was equally inconvenient. If the catalogs were downloaded onto a mobile device, they ate up a lot of space; and downloading them from the web while sitting with a customer was an inconvenient and time-consuming option.

Search for Solution

HPS was looking for a way to equip their sales team with an online library that would always be there for a salesperson to use. Specifically, the company was looking for a mobile app that would function on any device – Android or iOS – and would be easy to adopt for the teams.

HPS’s main goal was to get such an app to their sales team as fast as possible, and, apart from that, the company also had two key requirements:

• White-label and own branding features
• Self-service capability, so that they could change and update the catalogs in the app on their own and without any coding involved

The company could not have created such an app from scratch on their own and made the process cost- and time-effective, so they turned to FlippingBook.

We’ve developed other custom and white-label apps, but Salespal and the services provided by FlippingBook have been far more exemplary than the other services we’ve used. We were blown away by the turnaround time.

Solution

Salespal, custom named HPS Library, contains product catalogs that sales reps can access anytime, anywhere. They can download the catalogs to their mobile devices and use them offline or online.

The app supports text search, so it is now very easy for the customers to get specific information about a product in the catalog.

The app allows our sales team to engage with customers at a new level. Our industry and customers are still tied to catalogs, and with Salespal, the sales reps can carry over 100 catalogs at the same time. This would have been impossible before.

The company promotes the app through advertising, both internal and external, and hopes that it will help them to raise brand awareness among their potential customers as well as be a useful tool for their sales team.

Results

The adoption of Salespal has led to several changes for HPS. First, it’s helped the company to reduce printing costs, as more and more people within and outside the company are using the digital catalogs in the app instead of the print versions. Keeping the catalogs up-to-date is much easier as well, because they can be updated whenever necessary.

There is yet another, unexpected, but very pleasant consequence: the customized app FlippingBook Salespal has allowed the company’s sales team to respond to customers faster. Plus, the app is now used daily.

There has been a greater adoption of the app as an everyday tool. This can be seen in the increasing overall app download rates and the increasing number of catalog views in the 3-4 months since the app’s release (over 35,000 views).

However, the main reason Salespal is so important for HPS is that it has greatly improved the way salespeople access product information and communicate with customers. Before Salespal, they couldn’t get the correct and complete product information from the catalogs when they needed it, unless they used heavy PDFs or carried multiple print catalogs with them.

As our catalogs remain the single source of product information, it is important that the salespeople have access to them at all times. Now they can operate much faster and find information much more quickly than they ever could before.