Are You Ready for the Future of Mobile Sales?

Are You Ready for the Future of Mobile Sales?:from Wide Angle by Latika Mahajan
Organizations often struggle to provide timely and relevant information to salespeople. One way of bridging this gap is by providing real-time mobile support, on-and-off the field to improve process efficiencies. In fact, realizing the value of mobile support for salespeople, a recent CEB Sales survey shows that 46% of sales organizations are increasing their mobile budgets.
In an earlier blog, we had mentioned five key mobile capabilities that companies use or explore to improve sales efficiency—task and schedule management, real-time availability to CRM, access to BI and sales analytics, customer collaboration and interaction, information exchange and remote coaching. Our research shows that the popularity of back-end mobile capabilities like task and schedule management and CRM is fairly high. On the other hand, analytical activities like BI and sales analytics or interactive activities like customer collaboration, internal information exchange, and coaching are less popular, but drive greater efficiency.
To provide mobile capabilities ranging from back-end to analytical to interactive capabilities, we see progressive companies follow a structured path of moving from “Established” to “Emerging” mobile capabilities.

• “Established capabilities” include back-end and tactical activities like agenda management or customer account access and updates. And even within these activities, we see a greater focus on low-complexity, non-customer facing activities that increase productivity or drive efficiency. This is primarily done to demonstrate the value of mobile support and build broad level acceptance and comfort amongst the sales force.
• “Emerging capabilities” include analytical and interactive activities like business analysis, performance analysis, ROI modeling, and remote coaching. Leading companies recognize these activities as high value-add activities but believe these can be rolled out only at later stages, after systematically building salesperson confidence with mobile usage. Early adopters in some companies are already using certain aspects of emerging capabilities like Yammer and Chatter for information exchange, and even performance analysis to identify coaching areas.

Leading companies recognize that as the sales environment becomes more complex, the role of mobile as an effective sales tool that provides updated and timely information to the sales force will grow in importance. Indeed, companies that are tracking mobile effectiveness are seeing an uptick in task and business efficiency, a key reason for increase in mobile usage across the sales force.
How are you using mobile in sales? Which sales functionalities are you targeting and what has your experience been?