Want Kirby Leal to explain how smart phones can help businesses in tough times? Maybe there’s an app for that.

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One who believes there is an app for that is Daniel “Kirby” Leal who works as an inside sales rep at CMC Construction Services in Dallas. He takes full advantage of his particular cell phone, which allows him to download free applications.

Leal’s limited fluency in Spanish has been a concern for him, who assists many Spanish-speaking customers. But thanks to a Spanish translator application he downloaded on to his phone he now converses more easily with customers.

Another valuable application he downloaded was a conversion chart, which he admits he uses frequently.

“We sell rebar as a piece, but it’s also priced by the weight, so there’s a lot of conversion back and forth,” he says.

In the construction industry, and especially the concrete business, weather is a big concern with little time during work to watch the weather report on a news channel. Getting on the Internet to check for weather conditions sometimes proves time-consuming as well, but the phone application gives him the information he needs within seconds.

He also uses a specialized search engine to help customers find products that are hard to acquire (and sometimes harder to spell). The voice recognition feature allows him to say the name of the product into his phone while the search engine susses out how to spell it, then retrieves it for him.

When it’s time to entertain a client, he relies on a restaurant search engine application that can filter options by price, food type, and locations according to what the client feels like eating.

“There’s even an app for expense reports,” he says. “I can log when I started driving, what time I stopped driving, and how many miles.”

Leal says one of his vendors bought smart phones for its staff to use as business phones, and hopes other companies follow suit.

“A lot of companies don’t see the smart phones we may carry as a ‘business phone,’ that it’s more for games,” he says. “But there are a lot of upsides to it that people don’t normally see.”

CMC Construction Services supplies forming and shoring products to the North American commercial construction market. -–mj