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Which modules are part of the standard equipment of the Pitcher app?
A1: The Pitcher Business Solution contains 10 modules which aim to streamline various tasks
and engagements depending on your business operations and the industry you are serving.
Pitcher Impact: A patented mobile solution that acts as the hub for other modules, Pitcher
Impact streamlines customer interaction and tracks reactions to marketing collateral,
effectively closing the marketing feedback loop.
Pitcher Live!: The module that enables users to initiate remote engagements within the
app with the support of video and audio.
Pitcher Zero: Offers offline CRM with zero connectivity. Access data, make changes and
apply validation rules to CRM data even when completely offline.
Pitcher Instore: A smart automation used mostly in the CPG industry. Empowers users to
rapidly yet reliably capture instore data. Significantly increases the number of data points
captured per visit.
Pitcher Sales: Sophisticated trading that helps improve gross-to-net performance. Sales
cockpit tailored to local trade restrictions for order processing and an offline eligibility
engine for full control of discounts.
Pitcher Inflight: Inflight reporting with all the world’s data. Review visually appealing
dashboards on tablets even when completely offline and allow mobile users to track any KPI
with ease.
Pitcher Connect: Allow customer dialogue to be continued after the visit through co-
browsing and let reps determine what content customers can access for self-guided viewing
through their browser.
Pitcher Admin: Cloud-based, automatic conversion engine for drag and drop marketing
material distribution, enabling self-service content management and low TCO.
Pitcher Insight: Virtual analyst-in-a-box, your data when needed most. Connect multiple data
sources to one front end with fully documented APIs and no hidden costs.
Pitcher Remote: Remotely control the Pitcher Impact app via a second mobile device such as
your phone or tablet to enhance customer engagement and guide them through any
content.
Pitcher Coaching: Privately coach or be coached by anyone in your organization. Share
coaching spaces to include additional observers and participants.
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Which apps can I use offline?
All the apps mentioned above can be used offline without needing connectivity. Users will
be able to sync their engagements and all related data once they are back online without
hindering their daily activities.
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Can I use my CRM/Pitcher offline?
Yes, you can. Offline capability applies to accessing and utilizing your CRM data as well.
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Which languages are available and how many?
The solution’s user interface has 35 language configuration capabilities, and these are:
English, Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Bulgarian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese,
Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, Canadian French, German, Greek,
Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian,
Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish,
Ukrainian and Vietnamese. But ask our team as with every release new languages are being
added.
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Can sales teams use Pitcher to engage customers with live teleconference capabilities?
With Pitcher Live!, reps can create one single session to present to multiple customers,
thereby giving them the power to increase their productivity and reach. They can also
leverage hybrid scenarios where some participants are present and some are remote.
Pitcher Live! enables users to initiate remote engagements within the app with the support
of video and audio. Customers, on the other hand, can join from their browsers or mobile
devices to view what the user is presenting from Pitcher Impact. Not only will they be able to
see and hear the rep, but they will also be able to interact with the content as if they were
sitting next to each other.
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Can you provide analytics for the engagements?
The out-of-the-box analytics module called Pitcher Insight can provide visualizations and
dashboards for quick assimilation of buyers engaging with and consuming content, such as
views, time spent on pages, slides, videos and shares.
The platform tracks seller' use of content such as where and when they use content in the
buying cycle. It tracks how and when training content is consumed. It provides
leaderboards/gamification to inform other sellers as well as marketing and sales leaders
what the top-producing sellers are doing.
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What are the core capabilities you support? (E.g. initial opening, pages viewed, time viewed and forwarding to other recipients.)
Buyer consumption: an out-of-the-box tool, Pitcher Insight, provides real-time insight into
seller behavior. It has an extensive set of analytics such as views, number of meetings,
duration spent and parameters such as content type, content name, chapters, tags,
consumption mode (remote, F2F, self-guided), customer segmentation, etc. Using this
system, our customers can get started with a ready-made dashboard that shows industry
best practices, or they can build their own reports using our data cubes. Dashboards can be
consumed online interactively or can be subscribed to for scheduled delivery via email.
Seller consumption: Pitcher Insight is also integrated into the SFA. This not only allows
marketers to analyze content consumption, but to correlate it with their opportunity
pipelines or customer segmentations too. We also distinguish ‘Pitching Mode’ vs. ‘Training
Mode’. In ‘Training Mode’, a rep is not presenting to anyone – they are simply browsing. This
flows into a different cube where L&D analytics can be built upon.
Pitcher Inflight provides extensive out-of-the-box gamified reports that enable sellers to
correct their course throughout daily interactions and drive content adoption and behavior
across users. This way, sellers don't need to wait for marketers or managers to assess their
skills – instead, they can see what they should be focusing on and what they need to be
doing more or less of in the next interaction. This can even be coupled with their incentive
calculations.
Marketing ROI: ROI for marketing is no longer only about saving print costs or the express
delivery of sales collateral. Pitcher's customers would like to understand which part of their
marketing budget works. Pitcher provides dashboards that graphically visualize which
segment of customers best responds to specific messaging and what doesn't work at all. If
there is a visible opportunity pipeline, Pitcher overlays each step. If not, reps can easily
provide input about the sentiment of the buyers so, even in markets where there is no direct
deal closing (e.g. pharmaceutical sales or financial advisory), marketing can easily run A-B
campaigns to make more informed decisions.
Channel insights: Pitcher Insight’s analytical capabilities are available irrespective of whether
Pitcher is used as a standalone platform or integrated with channel partners' CRM or ERP
systems. Pitcher take into consideration the data sensitivity. So a distributor for a large
corporation can have named analytics for each opportunity, whereas the parent company
can see anonymized aggregates. We have deployed this with several large enterprises in
indirect markets and this flexibility in configuring permission-based analytics has proven
essential for the success of and adoption by the indirect channel.
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What type of AI/machine learning do you offer?
Pitcher Predict, Pitcher's ANN-based machine learning solution has a configuration interface
for the dimensions that should be considered for clustering and tagging to give
recommendations. These dimensions differ from customer to customer, however, in most
cases, we see a combination of CRM data, social media data, DWH input and content
analytics as inputs and KPIs (such as net profit increase, quota hits, visit attainment increase)
as success criteria. However, just having these inputs and outputs is not enough for any
algorithm to succeed. The size of the data set also matters. Therefore, if a customer has a
relatively large organization, Pitcher can work automatically and make recommendations
(Pitcher can use the same technology stack as Salesforce Einstein or AWS). Alternatively,
customers tag from the very first day, and make heuristic assumptions until the data size is
large enough.
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Can you create dashboards? Can they be individualized?
Unique dashboards can be created and shared with every user. Users can either access the
web-based panel to view dashboards or if they have Pitcher Impact, they can access the
offline version of these dashboards. The system can be configured to initiate dashboard
reporting, with reports being sent on a periodic basis to each individual's email account.
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Can managers have their own dashboards?
Dashboards are designed to provide data to each user depending on their hierarchical place
within the company. A sales rep will only get their territory information for instance,
whereas the sales manager will get results from the reps who are assigned to them. Pitcher
provides reports on people who are accessing dashboards.
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Do you support real-time collaboration via messaging?
Pitcher's native CRM integration leverages existing messaging services offered by the
respective CRM provider and makes them available offline. Additionally, Pitcher's
proprietary in-presentation voice and audio chat functionalities allow for ad-hoc
collaboration and support during sales interactions (e.g. technical/scientific support) or for
seller-buyer multichannel communication.
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Can a user send a message to a prospect using SMS or a team collaboration platform?
Yes. Pitcher offers a full range of multichannel capabilities. Depending on legal requirements, the buyer has to first provide consent for the channels they would like to be contacted on. Afterwards, these channels will be leveraged for content sharing and ad-hoc messaging. So that the seller does not have to monitor several channels, they can also choose a preferred channel through which all customer/prospect communication will be funneled. Supported channels include WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WeChat, Viber, Line, Telegram, Kakao and Apple Business Chat.
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What security capabilities do you offer for instant messaging?
AES-256 encryption at rest and during transmission.
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Can the solution be branded or customized for the client?
We took a different and innovative approach when developing the Pitcher Impact app. We
decided to build the first layer from native app which provides the fast and stable
environment required for any mobile solution to operate in. Secondly, an HTML5 layer was
built on top of the native layer to provide industry-specific solutions that can also service
customer-specific needs such as branding. This layer can be modified even by the customer
themselves via Pitcher Admin, facilitating continuous customer experience and flexibility
while providing the desired native app performance.
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Do you offer sales readiness, coaching, or learning capabilities?
Yes readiness, onboarding training and coaching can be done within Pitcher.
The Pitcher Coaching module offers behavior-based readiness content recommendations,
step-by-step video coaching with ad-hoc training requests, virtual roleplays with an instant
rating and feedback functionality, peer-to-peer ratings, collaborative evaluations and smart
success-based incremental development. Roleplays can be in real time, peer-to-peer with a
manager or group audience or recorded for later consumption. The training experience can
be interactively enriched for self-training or ad-hoc feedback/quiz cycles. Sharing capabilities
can be fully controlled (i.e. who sees what for how long) either manually or systematically by
role or function.
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What kind of sales content management features and capabilities do you offer for users and admins?
Users:
During the conversion process, we automatically extract and index the text within the
content. Taxonomy building of content is done automatically for free text search by our
users. On top of that, we allow our customers to choose from more than 25 different UI
options, each geared towards a particular behavior and sales cycle. This, plus the
configuration parameters we provide, is geared towards minimizing search requirements.
Since mobile devices are not built for typing, we try to minimize typing as much as possible
by using a combination of measures, including the intuitive organization of content, voice
recognition and AI.
Pitcher has its own artificial neural network-based content recommendation engine called
Pitcher Predict. Pitcher Predict automatically selects the relationship between customer
attributes, content attributes and real-time customer sentiment feedback from the reps. It
calculates success using the KPIs defined by our customers (increased sales, shorter sales
cycle, campaign enrollment, etc.) and re-weighs its neuronal weights. Once the dataset is
wide enough, we can offer the best action to sales reps depending on the situation they are
in. We have measured success rates upwards of 80% compared to the top sales team from
among our major customers where predictions were accurate.
We do not want to make chatbots out of sales reps. Pitcher is here to enable reps to become
better reps by making them more efficient, effective and relevant to their customers. Pitcher
therefore allows its users to create custom journeys for their customers while still adhering
to corporate compliance rules. For example, an admin can lock certain parts of a
presentation deck to make sure reps not only talk about the per liter cost but about the total
ROI as well. Or compliance can make sure that information is being presented in a balanced
way. This flexibility vs. compliance approach, coupled with a customer 360° dataset that
updates the content as well as pre, during or post-meeting surveys create a positive
feedback loop where the return of every minute of interaction is maximized. Should this fail,
reps have a very simple way to provide feedback: simply swiping on the lower part of the
screen. Using this patented technology, they can immediately notify the marketing
department about what works and what doesn't.
Administrators:
Pitcher has a proprietary content conversion engine (CCE) based on the AWS conversion of
files (types include .ppt, .pptx, .key, .pdf, .xls, .mov, .avi, .wmv, .mp3, .wav, .mpeg, .3DS,
.Blender, .USDZ, etc.) to appropriate end formats and optimization for access on various
mobile operating systems and devices. For AR, we work with OS manufacturers to provide
industry standard solutions to our customers as we have already deployed markerless AR
solutions to a variety of our customers.
Pitcher’s backend users can govern the field sales force’s level of flexibility in tailoring
corporate content on their own mobile devices. This includes creating building blocks of
content that can either be used in any order or an exact order, or defining disclaimer slides
that will be inserted automatically at the end of a custom presentation to ensure legal
compliance. By default, Pitcher will notify the user about new or updated content to ensure
the most recent content is accessed and downloaded. The content conversion engine makes
sure all interaction with content (including editing) is tracked, compliant and can be analyzed
by administrators. We ensure that by default only the latest version is available across the
sales organization.
Pitcher supports interactive tools like ROI and product calculators either via HTML5 or by
using Pitcher Spreadsheet which converts XLS files into HTML5 as part of the content
conversion process. In combination with the Pitcher Moustache functionality, it supports
real-time dynamic population from the CRM system and can create content dynamically
based on these inputs. Not only is data entered in tools and calculators fully trackable via
Pitcher Insight, Pitcher's proprietary analytics tool, but it can also be written back to the
CRM. These tools can also be used as part of custom decks created by users and will
maintain their interactivity and dynamic data population capability irrespective of where
they are used.
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Which types of content can you send to a prospect or customer (presentations, videos, MS Word files, etc.)? Are there file size limitations?
Presentations, brochures, spreadsheets, videos, surveys, interactive HTML5 (i.e. calculators
or product selectors), MS Excel, MS Word and MS PowerPoint. There are no file size
limitations when using Pitcher Zero (sharing via download URL) or Pitcher Connect (sharing
via microsite).
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Can content include CRM information when presenting to customers without users having to populate it manually?
There are several ways in which Pitcher can handle this. The first option is to use Pitcher's
Moustache functionality which lets administrators use a Pitcher proprietary syntax to define
placeholders in common content pieces (i.e. PPT or XLS) to dynamically populate them with
any field from the CRM system – no coding required. The second method is by using
placeholders in HTML5 which are filled manually or automatically before or during a
presentation.
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Can videos and rich media be added to presentations?
You can embed any existing videos and surveys in presentations (PPT, Keynote, HTML5) and brochures (PDF) with just a couple of clicks. To do this, you will need to access the presentation from Pitcher Admin and use enhancement tools to select the area you want to insert and the content you want to embed.