Salesforce Mobility Is Transforming the Sales Process

As they sweep the globe, mobile devices are revolutionizing the way business is done, especially for those in sales. Smartphones and tablets afford sales professionals a new level of connection to their data while on the go, a shift that has streamlined the sales cycle. In this blog post, I will talk about how sales mobility is transforming the sales process, how to evaluate the mobile apps out there, and how to find the right one that answers your specific needs.

The Aberdeen Group conducted a study across 250 organizations about their sales-effectiveness practices and the effect that these practices have had to understand how mobility has been employed and where it has been effective. In this study, the 250 firms were broken into three groups based on their performance including: Best-in-Class, Industry Average, and Laggard. According to the Best-in-Class firms in the study, 47% said sales mobility is absolutely vital to the company health, 42% said sales mobility being integral to success but cost limits how much they can implement, while 11% said it is worthwhile but difficult to justify cost of a significant commitment, and none said it has no impact on their business results.

Sales mobility is changing the landscape. Mutual Mobile also conducted a study on sales mobility, finding that among many factors, sales mobility is helping sales executives and sales operations increase sales revenue, improve CRM usage, find more leads, sell smarter, and better provide real-time data in the field, etc. However, Mutual Mobile also found that up to 71% of sales representative’s time is spent not selling; only 29% of a sales person’s time is spent with customers.

In order to increase your reps’ time in front of potential or current customers, you need to evaluate and deploy the right mobile application. Three important questions to ask when considering mobile apps are: 1) Can it can support key sales processes or workflow?, 2) Does it integrates with analytics, digital media and reporting and 3) Is it easy for the salesforce to adopt?

Support Key Sales Processes or Workflow

Aberdeen study defined the top five goals that end-users indicated are crucial to their efforts as demonstrated below:

As explained by the Aberdeen study: “The most popular desire, deploying mobile applications in support of traditional sales activities, speaks to the enterprise’s recognition of the need to retain all the crucial elements of the sales cycle. This includes: prospecting, proposing, closing and delivering business value to customers without a concern for physical location limitations.” In other words, you need to deploy an application that modeled the sales process from beginning to end.

Integrate with Analytics, Digital Media and Reporting

As Imran Rafique,  Sr. Analyst, Enterprise Mobility at Össur, one of our customers put it, “The combination of analytics, digital media, reporting, and custom apps allow our salesforce to engage with the customer on a deeper level than before…The more tightly integrated the applications are, the more value we can provide to our sales reps.”

Easy for Adoption

Without a doubt, user adoption is critical to utilize any mobile app’s fullest potentials. The most important factors influencing adoption within your sales team that will lead you to the right app are:

• Designed with a simple-to-use interface built around the needs of a sales rep on the go
• Integrated with a multitude of devices including: tablets, smartphones, and laptops
• Built to provide insights and intelligence in addition to customer information, sales history, and leads

Sales mobility will help your salesforce to “Do more with less”. And with the costs of sales mobility tools are declining on a daily basis, why not capitalize on these tools?

Aaron Tolson

Co-founder | Badger Maps

P.S: Check out the infographic below to see how sales mobility is transforming the sales process.

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