At a startup or small company, job roles are often blurred.
The founder might not necessarily see him or herself as a salesperson, but that’s not really a choice. If they’re NOT a salesperson every waking moment, they soon will be looking for other work.
Onshape’s primary use, of course, is for engineering and product design. But it is also proving to be extremely useful as a sales presentation tool.
Here’s why: Onshape is the first mobile CAD system that fully runs on phones and tablets (Android and iOS). It is not just a viewer. So when you are sharing your product model with potential investors or customers, you can spin it around, zoom closer into areas of interest and make edits or design changes on the fly.
And if there’s not a large screen in the conference room, everyone in the room can follow along on their phones or laptops – by signing up for their own free Onshape accounts in minutes.
Sales is all about presentation. It’s all about getting to the “Wow” factor. When a design is on paper or static on a screen, it’s much tougher to get there.
If a regular picture is worth a thousand words, now you have a dynamic, real-time interactive image you can edit. That’s worth a million words.
When you have to go back to the office and make requested changes, you lose momentum. Why not explore what the customer wants – and give them what they want – on-site and just close the deal? You can quickly show them how 2-3 different versions look and let them compare the pros and cons right there.
If you’re at a larger company, Onshape equally shines in the conference room. You may have an engineer and a salesperson team up for a presentation. Or a salesperson could call the office and have a lead designer make requested changes from there, in real time, as everyone in the room watches the product evolve.
For situations in which you are pitching your design to competing companies, Onshape’s Sharing feature allows you to instantly grant and withdraw view-only or editing permissions in the cloud. With traditional file-based CAD, you need to share copies of your work by email, with an FTP site or Dropbox. No matter how you share your design file, you have no control over who sees it. With Onshape, there is only one master copy of your work in the cloud. No copies floating around – ever. You have far greater control over who sees your intellectual property.
Security benefits aside, it’s showing, not telling, that makes the most memorable impressions about your product. You may not have even thought about giving your sales team access to CAD, but it could deliver unexpected dividends!