There’s a lot of talk in sales organizations today about leveraging mobile devices to help sellers maximize productivity on the road and to take customer engagements to the next level. But is this talk amounting to a lot of hot air?
A recent Sales Management Association study showed that more than 85% of sales organizations believe they should increase their investments in mobile devices for their sellers. Yet, only 3% had realized significant value from using mobile devices. What we’re seeing is a sales effectiveness divide between anticipated benefits and realized results.
This shouldn’t be surprising – we’re all likely to be swooned by the shininess of a new sales device or what seems ideally to be a practical sales tool but then find out that we haven’t perhaps prioritized the key use cases to deliver value AND determined what sales enablement processes are needed to ensure our targeted goals are realized. Web and email access are table stakes today — although key to everyday tasks, deploying mobile devices with these as the primary capabilities, you’re not going to move the needle on revenue attainment or competitive differentiation. Achieving sales results with mobile devices follows similar principles to improving effectiveness with any application or methodology.
So, here are 5 top mobile use cases for Sales — and what you need to do to ensure success with each:
1. Account Management/Geo-Location: 
take advantage of those 5 spare minutes between appointments to knock-out admin tasks and when an appointment cancels last-minute, find other hot prospects or key customers to visit since you’re in the area.
Success Enablers
- One-Click Access: ensure admin tasks are accessible via “one-click” in your mobile CRM app so that sellers don’t waste time trolling through numerous menus to get to the right place to add contacts, activities and opportunities, update sales stages and forecasts, etc.
- Show Proof Points: engage a few top reps to pilot these capabilities, note their productivity improvements/time savings and translate this into revenue. If other reps see how their peers have gotten more time to sell and how this translates to revenue and quota attainment, they’ll feel the itch to employ better sales hygiene on the road.
2. Sales Intelligence & Guided Selling: uncovering a customer’s unique business challenges and bringing new ideas that deliver business results are more important than ever with today’s information-empowered customers. Real-time customer intelligence, breaking news and customer-relevant selling content are the first step in successfully preparing for every call, every meeting and every close.
Success Enablers
- All-in-One-Place: Embed sales intelligence and guided selling content in the context of accounts and opportunities so that sales people have in one place on their mobile app to access everything they need to know about a particular prospect, customer or opportunity.
- Preso-to-Demo in One Tap: In addition to customer presentations, ensure that product demos are enabled on mobile devices, especially tablets. Tablets are a great medium to showcase products and make even the most complex products or solutions look easy, tangible and exciting.
3. Collaboration: 
complex selling processes get bogged down further when sales professionals waste time looking for the right internal experts who can help them understand each customer’s unique challenges and deliver the right message. Once they found these experts, keeping them and the extended team up-to-speed with what’s happening on the account or opportunity is time-consuming. Ensure that sales collaboration is enabled on mobile devices so that sales professionals can easily stay connected with the people they need to move each deal forward.
Success Enablers
- All-in-One-Place: as with Sales intelligence and Guided-Selling, collaboration and social selling embedded in the context of accounts and opportunities makes it easy for sales professionals to connect with internal experts and customers without having to corral relevant prospect or customer information to give context to the discussion or get everyone on the same page.
- Social Selling Kit: Once you have internal sales collaboration in place, take the next step by tapping into social channels to find the right contacts for each account, see who in your network can provide a warm introduction and learn what each contact cares about. Make each engagement personal and relevant. Provide reps with simple social selling tactics to start, to help them get started and learn what works. Some sales tools offer both collaboration and social engagement, so make sure these capabilities are available on mobile devices.
4. Track Sales Performance: 
make it easy for sales reps and managers to keep tabs on how far they are from making their number and what they need to do to close the gap.
Success Enablers
- It’s a Popularity Contest: Find out which analytics and dashboards are most popular and make these available on sales reps’ sales mobile app home page so that they can get to them in 1-click.
- Get Smart: Provide interactive analytics such as “what-if” analyses that enable reps and managers to determine which deals to focus on to bring them over the finish line. Providing sales folks with sales aids such as these (and others above) give them a reason to log-in to their sales mobile app, creating stickiness and improving adoption, in addition to helping them sell.
5. Pricing, Orders, Inventory – the Back Office: countless hours are wasted looking up contracted pricing, tracking down order and shipment statuses, confirming inventory to commit – and many other back-office tasks. In many cases, having this information available real-time when talking with a customer can be the make-or-break in getting the next order or finding that blue bird deal.
Success Enablers
- Keepin’ It Real: when it comes to back-office information, it needs to be fresh, available in real-time. Having old pricing, delayed shipment statuses or outdated inventory levels creates a slew of problems and causes reps to revert back to old habits of calling Inside Sales or Customer Service reps with the fire-drill du jour. Ensuring your back-office systems can provide real-time information and work seamlessly with your mobile sales app is key.
As with many new approaches or methodologies, adoption is predicated upon making the approach useful to sales reps and sales managers. It’s no different with the new mobile devices available today. Put yourself in your sellers’ shoes and ask, “What’s in it for me?” Each of these use cases gives you a credible answer. In addition, the good news is that mobile devices today provide a great platform for slick, easy-to-use apps that salespeople are more inclined to use, so accelerating sales effectiveness should be easier if you’re putting the right use cases in your sellers’ hands.
Want more on Mobility? Check out these two mobile demos:
- Customer Insight – Our new iPad app that is optimized for quick access to the information that matters most
- Mobility – An overview video of the general mobile capabilities available with Sales OnDemand
