A radio veteran
Thomas has been working with radios for 42 years. He told us that he got interested in CB and ham radio when he was 12 years old, and has loved two-way radios ever since. So it seemed fitting that he would found Reliable Communications, an Icom radio dealer. The company sells primarily to schools, hospitals, factories and public safety, but offers services to anyone that can use two-way radios.
As President, Thomas does everything from accounting, to bench work, to sales, to customer service and everything in between. He interacts with everyone from the sales team, to end users, to tech managers and more.
The challenge
“Presentation is everything when you present a proposal to a customer,” Thomas explained. Before using D3M, the only tools he had at his disposal to design and document two-way radio networks were basics like Word, Excel and pen and paper. “With my past process, I was unable to find the associated graphics. It was quite time-consuming. I then had to take all the information and create a professional looking proposal.”
The WOW moment
It happened at the Icom conference where I first saw D3M and what it could do. I got a one-on-one demonstration with the D3M sales representative and that was the WOW moment for me. I thought I had to have it, as it would make a night-and-day difference with my presentations, making them more professional and improving the image of our company.
Getting up and running
Thomas participated in D3M’s training webinar, had all his questions answered, and found everything that he needed was covered. He notes that there was a learning curve, as D3M is so robust and there's a lot to it, but was happy to play around and experiment with it. “The process of learning D3M wasn't difficult … It was well worth the investment!”
Thomas explained “When I signed up for the 14-day trial it was right as I needed to do a large proposal, so I thought it would be a great test of D3M. I wanted the presentation to be professional and was able to do so using D3M. I thought it looked great when it was done and once there were changes to be made after the initial meeting it was easy to update, reprint and resubmit. It really worked out great. When presenting the proposal, I printed it to share with the client, as I had made a packet to hand out to each department head. After that, I only need to reprint the quote pages with the quantity changes I had made, which I found extremely easy to do. I found implementing the prices into the quote tool was extremely easy and I got it right away. I have yet to use the margins tool, but I believe it will be very valuable to me in the future.”
What has changed
I use D3M every day and it absolutely saves me time. It saves me the most time during the creation of the system configuration graphics. Just drag and drop, connect the dots and you're done. I also share the documents with my team, and plan on using D3M as a support tool after sales are completed.
The most significant benefit Thomas has seen from using D3M is it provides a professional looking quotation. “I have been looking for years for an application like it and have bought different presentation and quotation softwares, however, they were nowhere near as robust as D3M and never came out looking as professional. I am glad I discovered D3M. The presentations I can now create using D3M are completely professional. Once I began using D3M it was a night-and-day difference between what I was doing before,” he said.
The bottom line
“D3M helps me to present an absolutely killer proposal to the customer. I would absolutely recommend it. I think D3M is comprehensive and has everything I need – there is nothing else I would add.”