Entrepreneurs find a better way to manage technical sales
Monday, January 1 2001
TWO YEARS AGO, Brian Gardner started working on an inhouse software package to organize the sales staff at Baton Rouge industrial parts and instrumentation reseller BreardGardner Inc. At the time, he had no idea he was about to build a new career, much less a new company.
He and programmer Mario Igrec were focused on creating a software package from the ground up that would give BreardGardner's 75-person sales team a way to organize customer orders, contact lists, correspondences, product information and sales tracking records in one integrated system.
He didn't fully realize the software's value until he was sitting next to the chief executive officer of a $200 million Houston technical and industrial sales company nearly one month after Breard-Gardner had fully integrated the system. The man said his company, Rawson & Co., was having a hard time adapting a generic sales force automation system to the complex needs of technical and industrial sales.
On a lark, Gardner showed him a demo of the software: "He gave us a purchase order two days after he saw the system," Gardner says. Rawson shelled out approximately $90,000 for the new software and the company now known as Selltis LLC was born.