Project Description:

1. Independent business owners can check daily "heads-up" business statistics.
2. Easy-to-read, graphical reports, rather than reams of paper, allow managers to see in a glance what previously took hours of searching through reports.
3. A custom "portal" interface lets the sales force view information specifically tailored to their needs and geographic location.
4. Using PDA technology allows for palm top data capture and delivery that reduces timely paper work while keeping the sales force mobile.
5. Integrated reminders and "to do's" keep all of the business activities on track and on time.

Spread out across the country, interspersed in metropolitan, suburban and rural areas, is a sales force of monumental size. Their mantra is "live the dream" as they practice the art of helping people obtain "financial freedom." This is the grassroots army of the financial services company.

Numbering over 80,000, sales team of independent business owners not only represents the financial industry's largest sales force, but also one of the most diverse. The company's challenge was to get accurate business statistics, client information, and policy training to this large, geographically dispersed audience. And, supporting the sale of new, more complicated services by a team with a wide range in educational backgrounds was becoming nearly impossible.

Ariel worked quickly to help the financial services company create a strategic vision of how a single, e-business system could support such a diverse and distributed field force by opening communications and streamlining processes that required manual effort.

By replacing mountains of reports with visual displays of the information, providing daily views of business metrics, and reducing paperwork though palm top data capture, the financial services company can get more information to its sales force in less time. Additionally, by giving the sales force critical information when they need it, they require less training, and are more capable of cross-selling the company's complex financial products.