- After receiving a R431 million investment in early 2020, South Africa’s Skynamo has now acquired a popular UK field sales app.
- The Skynamo platform allows manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors to track sales.
- On a monthly basis, the system captures over 130,000 orders worth R1 billion to customers.
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Stellenbosch-based tech company Skynamo, which has an app that helps salespeople, has bought a UK app to expand its global reach.
The latest move by Skynamo comes almost one year after it received a $30 million dollar investment – R431 million at the time – from a US-based venture capital firm, Five Elms.
The Skynamo platform allows manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors to track sales. Digital catalogues, performance-tied analytics systems and automated customer reporting are all contained within the app.
For sales reps, this cuts down the time spent on admin, and allows suppliers to note, in real-time, the details of customers visited and orders submitted through an integrated digital map. Every month, the system captures over 130,000 orders worth R1 billion to customers, according to Skynamo.
Offered in three separate packages, the entry-level “Team” version of Skynamo costs around R680 per month.
Skynamo, which has offices in the US, UK and South African, on Monday announced that it bought mSeller. The UK-based sales app has been a popular sales solution in the toys, giftware, confectionary, stationery and furniture sectors, according to Sam Clarke, the CEO of Skynamo.
In addition to the purchase entrenching Skynamo’s footprint in the UK, aspects of mSeller will be used to enhance the app’s management systems and digital catalogue capabilities.
“By merging the best features of mSeller into Skynamo, we’ll be able to offer the global market a truly holistic order management and digital catalogue experience for field sales reps and their customers,” explains Clarke, who adds that pandemic-related disruptions to field sales have exposed the urgent need for technological solutions.
But small businesses in the UK and South Africa, in particular, have been slow to embrace innovative sales management systems. Nudging these small businesses away from paper-based systems and towards mobile-first, cloud-based solutions remains Skynamo’s primary focus. The key to access this market relies on simplifying the app’s user experience, while maintaining the platform’s all-in-one functionality.
“We’ve found that small businesses in particular, in the UK and South Africa, are late adopters of innovative sales and order management technology like ours, so there’s a big opportunity for us to grow by helping them move from paper-based sales processes to digital through an easy-to-use application,” says Clarke.
Skynamo is tight-lipped around the finer financial details of the purchase of mSeller, saying “the acquisition was made for an undisclosed amount”.
In January 2020, Skynamo was named the international software group Sage’s top independent software vendor of the year.
(Compiled by Luke Daniel)