Traditional mid-sized business meets AI: How Kern & Sohn saves over 3 hours of paperwork per travel day
Germany's oldest scale manufacturer shows how AI works in traditional field sales: Instead of spending hours typing up visit reports after work, the team led by process manager Lisa Haiß has reduced documentation time per appointment from 60 minutes to under 10. Fully GDPR-compliant and with 100% focus on the customer.
Traditional mid-sized business meets AI: How Kern & Sohn saves over 3 hours of paperwork per travel day
The results at a glance:
- 80% time savings per visit report: Follow-up time per customer appointment dropped from 45–60 minutes to a maximum of 5–10 minutes.
- Over 3 hours of time gained per travel day: With an average of five on-site appointments, the hours spent typing up reports in hotel rooms after work are a thing of the past.
- Full attention for the customer: Field staff no longer need to frantically take notes during consultations, allowing them to focus entirely on building relationships and identifying needs.
- Uniform standards for management: Team leaders receive structured, instantly comparable reports instead of disorganized, free-text narratives.
- High user acceptance through involvement: A diverse, international pilot group gradually overcame the typical skepticism toward AI in the mid-market sector.
- GDPR security for management: A closed system with no data training for third parties and server locations within the EU made approval straightforward.
The starting point: When bureaucracy hinders customer loyalty
KERN & SOHN GmbH, based in Balingen, looks back on over 180 years of company history. As a traditional manufacturer of precision scales, measuring devices, and optical instruments, the company supplies laboratories, industrial clients, and medical facilities worldwide. The backbone of its sales operations is its traditional field service: Area Sales Managers travel domestically and internationally to visit customers directly, provide on-site consultations, and manage complex projects.
However, the associated bureaucratic burden was reaching its limits in day-to-day operations:
To be honest, the amount of writing involved was enormous typical German bureaucracy, really. During on-site meetings, you can only jot down keywords because you want to give the person you're talking to your full attention. But after the meeting, that had to be turned into a detailed report. That often took 45 minutes to an hour per meeting. If our field staff had five meetings a day, they would spend up to five hours in their hotel rooms at night just writing reports. The effective time for the customer fell by the wayside. Lisa Haiß, Sales & Marketing Process Manager at Kern & Sohn
The core operational friction points:
- Divided attention on-site: Field staff were constantly caught in a balancing act, trying to provide attentive advice while simultaneously taking handwritten notes on essential details.
- Lost evenings while traveling: After five exhausting customer meetings, drafting the reports meant up to five hours of writing on a laptop in a hotel room.
- Lack of comparability: Every field representative had their own documentation style. Team leaders had to laboriously sift through pages of reports to filter out relevant sales opportunities and action items.
- Skepticism toward US tools: For management, one thing was clear: typical US tools were out of the question due to data protection concerns. Under no circumstances could customer data or meeting content be allowed to leak externally.
The path to a solution: Acceptance is built by the user, not at a desk
The impetus came from a presentation by Kickscale CEO Gerald Zankl at the Sales Summit in Hamburg. Lisa Haiß immediately recognized the potential for Kern & Sohn, but approached the implementation in the mid-sized company in a deliberate and methodical way.
To address reservations and the understandable caution toward new technologies common in mid-sized companies early on, she relied on a clear best-practice approach:
- Timely backing from leadership: Before researching tools, Lisa Haiß secured the fundamental go-ahead from the sales management, supported by a clear preliminary calculation of time and cost potential.
- A genuine, heterogeneous pilot group: Instead of testing the tool alone at a desk, five to seven Area Sales Managers were involved from day one with different travel schedules and native languages (including German, Polish, and French).
- Practical testing under real-world conditions: The field sales team tested Kickscale directly while traveling domestically and abroad. Feedback was often sent back from their hotel rooms that same evening.
- Step-by-step instead of overwhelming: Instead of overhauling processes overnight, Kern & Sohn deliberately gave the team time to get comfortable with the technology and develop their own way of working with it.
"In the mid-market sector, there is often an initial spark of fear or skepticism when it comes to AI. That’s why it was extremely important to me that acceptance comes from those who work with it daily, not just from management. When users realize that the tool makes their lives easier, genuine enthusiasm follows." Lisa Haiß, Sales & Marketing Process Manager at Kern & Sohn
How Kern & Sohn uses Kickscale in field sales today
Today, Kickscale is the go-to digital assistant for Area Sales Managers at Kern & Sohn – both for on-site customer visits and online meetings:
- Discreet recording: Conversations are recorded on-site or in video meetings and transcribed with precision – even when it comes to technical terminology related to measurement technology or international accents.
- Customized prompts in company language: Kern & Sohn uses custom-defined prompts. After each conversation, Kickscale extracts exactly the core information that matters to the company: project goals, specific requirements, customer feedback, the competitive landscape, and the next steps to take.
- Wrap-up in minutes: The sales representative reviews the structured report draft on their laptop or smartphone, makes final additions in five to ten minutes, and transfers the finished data directly into the existing company systems.
- Consistent standards: All 30 connected sales representatives now submit reports using the same clear, uniform structure.
Impact and results
Up to 40 minutes less paperwork per customer meeting
The time required to draft a visit report dropped from 45–60 minutes to a maximum of 5–10 minutes. On a typical travel day with five customer meetings, each sales rep saves over three hours of pure documentation time. Evenings in the hotel room are now for relaxing instead of endless typing.
More time for genuine customer relationships
Without the pressure of having to jot down every detail during a conversation, the sales team can stay fully focused on the person in front of them. This leads to noticeably better engagement, more accurate needs analysis, and a stronger personal connection with the customer.
Full transparency for team leaders
Managers no longer have to struggle through individual free-text reports. Thanks to the standardized structure, team leaders can see at a glance where support is needed, which offers are pending, and how customer projects are progressing.
Pioneers for the modern mid-sized company
Kern & Sohn demonstrates how a traditional company can effectively integrate modern technology. By focusing on user adoption, clear processes, and reliable data protection, AI has evolved from a theoretical trend into an indispensable tool for 30 sales representatives.
Why Kern & Sohn chose Kickscale
- GDPR & closed system: Hosting within the European legal framework and the guarantee that sensitive customer data will not be leaked or used for AI models convinced both management and data protection officers.
- Freedom in prompts and formats: No rigid templates, but rather the ability to individually map company-specific terminology and an unlimited number of conversation formats.
- Collaborative support: Uncomplicated assistance, flexible extensions of trial phases during busy travel weeks, and accessible, German-speaking support on equal footing made the decisive difference for Kern & Sohn.
Kickscale features used
- AI Notetaker & Transcription: Automatic recording and precise transcription of on-site visits and online meetings.
- Custom Prompts: Tailor-made prompts for the structured extraction of sales-relevant information for field service visit reports.
- Multilingual speech recognition: Reliable capture of various languages and accents across the international sales network.
- Team & meeting types: Individual configurations for different sales areas without limitations.
Kickscale is just fantastic to use. It simply makes life easier. Our field sales team is so happy that they no longer have to take notes on the side and can focus entirely on the customer. The whole package is just right. Lisa Haiß, Sales & Marketing Process Manager at Kern & Sohn
Ready to significantly optimize your sales processes?
Book a demo ?
Try Kickscale for free now !
Your sales team deserves clarity instead of guessing games
With our AI revenue intelligence platform, we help innovative sales teams make better decisions and close more deals.
AI in Sales: How fonio automates HubSpot entries, follow-ups, and international sales coaching
How a growing AI telephony scale-up with an international sales team uses automated scorecards and seamless HubSpot synchronization to make sales quality visible.
How Lufthansa City Center turns 2–3-hour partner meetings into strategic market intelligence
"Just start." That is all Sebastian Pommerencke would say to anyone still hesitating.
"We can't scale 5x using Excel spreadsheets": How Octonomy improved forecasting with Kickscale after a €20M investment
"What I was missing most was a cockpit—a single point of truth for everything related to sales," recalls Frank (CRO). "I need a place where I have information about my deals."
How the Lime Connect sales team reclaimed 195 working days per year with AI
Saving 2 hours per employee each week, our 15 sales consultants spend less time on administration and more time closing deals.
How Cropster scaled global sales coaching without working 24/7
"I led the European team, which was manageable," Martin explains. "But when my US colleague left in May and I took over globally, I realized I would have to work 24 hours a day to join calls and understand how my team sells across all these time zones."
How Finmatics turned 7 years of wasted data into sales excellence
By saving 10% of time per salesperson, creating permanently searchable customer conversations, and generating cross-departmental intelligence for product, sales, and leadership teams
More deals, zero typing: How Clockodo reclaims 7 hours a week for real customer conversations
German B2B SaaS company Clockodo faced the challenge of managing a growing volume of leads efficiently and in compliance with GDPR. With Kickscale, the team led by Chief Customer Officer Vera Keßler reduced administrative follow-up time per customer call from 30 minutes to a maximum of 10, while simultaneously creating a direct bridge between service and product development.
50% more efficiency in sales with AI
"We are much faster with follow-ups because we have everything directly in the CRM, so we spend very little time trying to remember what the customer actually said."
How finway made its sales process more efficient with AI
"Thanks to Kickscale's automated call summaries and follow-up emails, our sales team spends 60-80% less time on administrative tasks and more time actually selling."
From admin chaos to maximum customer focus: Jiri Siklar's AI strategy
With automated note tracking and objective AI coaching, sales reps save massive amounts of time on CRM maintenance and continuously improve their win rates.
How Atmio eliminates 2–3 hours of post-meeting work and empowers junior sales from day one
"When I joined Atmio, I said immediately: We need Kickscale." Saskia - International Sales Manager
How Placetel’s sales team saves 1 to 2 hours per employee every day and uncovers the "story behind the numbers"
With massive time savings on CRM maintenance and automated AI coaching, Placetel’s 20+ users spend less time on documentation, have accelerated new hire onboarding by 25%, and are turning gut feelings into hard data.
ContractHero increases its closing rate using Conversation Intelligence
More precise insights into sales conversations.
