GUEST BLOGGER: Jeffrey Mortensen at DataXoom
The rate of mobile device usage throughout the sales process has increased significantly during the last decade, and not by chance either. According to the Aberdeen group, 90% of sales organizations have invested in tablets as their newest digital sales aid, and 70% say they’ve already achieved a positive ROI.
If your sales staff have not yet embraced a mobile sales application, they’re making a huge mistake—tablets have dramatically improved the way in which salespeople make sales. Not convinced that tablets are the way to go? Allow us to explain how tablets can improve the effectiveness of your team’s sales.
Tablets increase productivity.
The traditional sales process is riddled with inefficiencies which lead to unproductive in-person sales calls. Before tablets, salespeople would use in-person sales presentations to make their pitch and gather information about the prospective client, so that they could then return to the office and put together an estimate for the client. Add up the additional driving time, and the time it takes to put together the content, and your salesperson has wasted several hours, hours they could have spent actually making sales.
- The amount of time spent in selling activities accounted for 47% of a Sales Rep’s day in 1998
- In 2013, that percentage has dropped to 35% of a Sales Rep’s day
- A 25% drop in efficiency over a decade or so (Source: ROInnovations, 2014).
Mobile sales apps enable the sales team with content at their fingertips, even if web access drops off, your Reps have the right content when they need it. These apps shave hours off the sales process, allowing your salespeople to spend more time closing deals and generating revenue.
Instant access to important tools and resources.
In a study conducted by Profitable Channels, the company found that, sadly, 30 hours per month are spent by each individual salesperson just searching for and creating digital sales content. Ironically, this unnecessary searching for sales content is actually hurting the ability of salespeople to close deals.
Adaptive sales enablement is a device agnostic mobile sales application that allows Marketing teams to pre-flight digital sales content to sales playbooks. The result is a Sales Rep with Marketing approved content right when they need. When Sales Reps create content, they waste time, their job is to be micro-marketers, meaning they are tasked with optimizing a one-to-one communication through the assembling of contextually relevant Marketing pieces for the immediate sales presentation.
Adaptive sales enablement ensures that the right content always faces the right Reps, at the right time, every time.
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Increased visual engagement.
Times are changing, and simple, generic, poorly tailored white papers and PowerPoint presentations just aren’t cutting it anymore when it comes to engaging customers in the field. If your salespeople expect to engage prospective customers and close more deals, then they’re really going to have to step it up.
Nowadays, tablets loaded with colorful, engaging media are the way to go. Your salespeople are much more likely to peak the interest of a prospective customer with animated demos, videos, slideshows, and quotes. Making sales pitches in this engaging, consultative fashion is much more effective, and will undoubtedly lead to a greater number of conversions.
On a longer term, this kind of mobile sales application can influence end-of-funnel consumption insight, which will enable your Marketing team to create tailored whitepapers and PowerPoint presentations that truly delight the buyer and offer topically relevant insights.
Give presentations that are relevant to the client.
In the past, Sales teams would spend hours creating presentations in the office, and salespeople would then go on sales calls, giving the same presentation to every prospective client. Don’t get me wrong, your Rep’s presentations are probably fantastic, but the fact of the matter is that every client is different. Therefore, a cookie-cutter approach to sales is not ideal.
Tablets enable salespeople to design tailored presentations on the road, allowing them to micro-market their presentations to particular clients. This is extremely useful for salespeople that spend all day going from client to client—tablets allow them to make edits to their presentations between sales calls. Your prospective clients are more likely to respond to a presentation that was made just for them.
Considering the significant influence that Reps hold near the end of the funnel, these consumption insights are paramount to effective long term persona optimization. Mobile sales content management software automatically enables analytics tracking, regardless of whether a content piece was disassembled and combined into a new piece, and presented across several mediums.
Increased connectedness and collaboration amongst salespeople, and their counterparts in Marketing.
Before tablets, there used to be a large disconnect between salespeople in the field and team members in the office. However, with tablets, your salespeople can give their other team members real-time updates from the road, including the status of their sales, as well as notes from their sales calls. They can also communicate with other team members during sales calls as a way to crowdsource answers to any questions their clients may have.
When done correctly, the result is Sales and Marketing alignment, which is perhaps the single greatest corporate strategy available for improving content effectiveness at the organizational level. Adaptive sales enablement further automates this process through the use of closed loop marketing.
Closed loop marketing takes end-of-funnel consumption insights and applies them to the CRM system, which improves buyer awareness, and enhances the buyer persona in the Marketing Automation system. When end-of-funnel insights are applied, Marketers truly understand how and why their content is effective for the real buyer, not the perceived target market.
This guest post is courtesy of Jeffrey Mortensen, Content Manager for DataXoom. DataXoom is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) which provides simple and flexible mobile data services to businesses in the United States. If you’re using 4G or LTE to access your Skura mobile sales enablement app, we’d love to connect!
