OVERVIEW:
With the acceleration of mobile and cloud computing technologies, business is increasingly on-the-go. Mobility plays a crucial role in differentiating best-in-class sales teams from their competitors. According to a recent study conducted by Aberdeen Research, sales representatives of 40% of best-in-class companies use mobile devices regularly during client interactions. A company can invest in a fleet of tablets for their sales teams, but how do they ensure sales teams are optimizing mobile technology? To ensure ROI in the hardware, a company must make strategic decisions on the right apps, platforms, processes, and leadership.
HARNESS MOBILE SALES ENABLEMENT
With the right tools and strategy, sales reps can maximize mobile devices to collaborate more effectively with their team and clients to:
1. Close more deals. CSO Insight discovered that sales organizations using mobile CRM and social sales tools won 7% more deals than their peer firms who did not use mobile tools. Mobile devices enable real-time access to information needed to progress and accelerate a sale. Mobile sales enablement solutions create a distinct client experience through:
• Interactive and collaborative client experiences that leverage video, graphics, and 3D assets to engage clients and promote a more consultative selling approach.
• Faster time-to-market by making it easier to launch, update, and adapt sales programs in the field.
• Real time access to sales and marketing assets at the right time to advance the sale.
2. Increase productivity. CDW IT Monitor found 74% of IT decision-makers indicated using tablets and smartphones has led to an increase in productivity in their organization. Accelerate performance with mobile sales solutions by:
• Providing one central hub for fast and flexible access to product catalogs, CRM systems, and workflow management.
• Effectively training salespeople through quick-access sales playbooks, toolkits, and guides that help reps get up-to-speed faster and reinforces selling best practices with coaching tools while also providing better visibility into salespeople’s activities.
• Enabling salespeople to work anytime, anyplace with or without an internet connection.
3. Optimize the Sales Approach. Profitable Channels found that 13% of large enterprise companies were planning for or investing in mobile sales programs to facilitate data-driven decision support in the field. Leverage analytics to quickly interpret and optimize the sales approach by:
• Providing data-driven decision support, customized product recommendations, and subject matter expertise in the field to enable better cross-selling recommendations.
• Delivering expert advice in consultative selling situations such as value assessments, economic trade off analyses and cost justification models.
• Tracking and understanding sales asset usage, efficacy and waste and capturing, identifying and sharing best practices of top performers.
OVERCOMING HURDLES TO SUCCESS
Deploying a customized mobile sales enablement solution is a relatively new discipline and can often be quite daunting. It requires vision, a business case and a clear roadmap for success. The biggest barriers to driving growth and ROI from mobility are business issues. When companies try to implement sales enablement solutions, there are some common roadblocks that appear:
• Unclear, ill-defined sales process methodology needed to serve as a blueprint for a mobile selling solution.
• Disorganized sales support infrastructure needed to support mobile selling – including selling technology, content, training, and data. This typically results from assets created by multiple owners in an uncoordinated fashion.
• Misaligned sales assets that do not support how salespeople really sell or how customers buy.
• Inactive business leaders that do not take an active role in defining how mobile devices should help sales or prioritizing resources for investing in mobile sales enablement.
To overcome these obstacles, a few practical steps can ensure a company realizes the full potential of mobile to effectively transform the sales process.
1. Build your future state vision for how mobile sales enablement can transform your go-to-market process.
2. Understand your current state process, content, and technical assets that can provision your mobile sales enablement program to understand your baseline for this process.
3. Align sales assets to both the seller’s and buyer’s journeys to identify gaps in the sales process and buying experience and identify opportunities for improving and aligning content.
4. Identify stakeholders and process owners to ensure no resource waste or duplication and a cohesive and coordinated strategy.
5. Create an execution roadmap based off business requirements and priorities to direct the process for deploying and optimizing mobile sales enablement technology.
CONCLUSION
As you consider how to improve and accelerate sales effectiveness in your organization, it is imperative to consider a mobile sales enablement process to drive revenue growth, differentiate the selling and buying experience and solve for the productivity issues that sales organizations inevitably encounter. To remain competitive, it is time to adapt to the increasingly mobile and data-driven landscape and make a significant investment in the modern mobile selling system to improve your organization’s selling effectiveness.
