F
or some time now, industry leaders have been investing in iPads and other tablets to modernize customer relations. More and more, these devices are emerging as a central tool for sales forces.
Today, with the right tech at their disposal, forward-thinking businesses have begun implementing mobile apps to transform their image, streamline processes and increase sales productivity. What’s your sales force doing to stay ahead in this rapidly shifting market?
Modernizing your sales functions goes well beyond implementing a CRM. While many companies have significantly transformed the way they manage customer relations, customer meetings are a whole other story. When we look at the tools in play, it’s not hard to see how sales representatives have been trapped in purgatory for the last 20 years. PowerPoints, PDFs, paper-based brochures—nothing much has changed with regards to the most important step in your sales cycle: the face-to-face meeting.
If you’re thinking about modernizing your sales approach and, more specifically, meetings and presentations, here are some things to consider.
Tablets or Laptops?
Which best serves your sales representatives? When posing this question, you need to consider costs, ease of use and your team’s everyday needs.
You may be surprised to learn that a 12.9-inch iPad Pro has considerably more power than an entry-level MacBook (not to mention, it’s almost a third of the price). With useful touch-screen and mobile features, as well as a highly intuitive iOS, the iPad emerges as the sales force winner.
In addition to all this, there’s the added benefit of Apple’s Device Enrollment Program, which gives businesses a fast, easy, streamlined and secure deployment experience. It reduces costs and optimizes employee satisfaction.
Not to mention, numerous studies show that using a tablet has a positive impact on both company image and project professionalism.
Should My Sales Force Be Using a Mobile App?
A mobile app supports your sales people throughout several steps of the sales cycle. It’s not a CRM but rather, a complementary tool to assist your sales force in their daily tasks. Live customer presentations, digital catalogs, interactive training, clienteling, assigning tasks and transmitting/sharing documents are all features that can be easily deployed to increase efficiency and modernize your approach. Ultimately, to embrace a mobile sales app is to sell more, sell better and simplify complex processes..
8 Reasons Why You Need a Mobile Sales App
1 – The Right Content at the Right Time…Right at Your Fingertips
Prepping and executing the perfect PowerPoint presentation can be a lengthy, cumbersome and repetitive process. What begins as a time-consuming, labor-intensive endeavor often ends with your clients nodding off.
Thanks to a mobile sales app, there’s no more fumbling through folders to retrieve your work. In fact, you can say goodbye to PowerPoint altogether. Now, all your sales and marketing documents are centralized and accessible both online and off. Your linear content transforms into an interactive app that can be updated remotely and centrally managed by your marketing department. It can even collect all usage data.
2 – Modernize Your Sales Force’s Image
Consider the following scenario: on the same afternoon, a potential customer meets with your company and a slew of others. The competition uses tedious PowerPoint presentations, paper brochures and documents scattered in multiple folders. Much of the presentation requires a Wi-Fi connection that they may not even have access to.
You, on the other hand, greet your prospect with nothing more than a simple iPad in hand. After connecting the device to a portable projector, you launch an app that has your company logo as its icon and easily navigate through all your marketing content: products and services, presentations, videos, brochures, etc. You also have access to your prospective customer’s profile and complete company history.
With just a few finger taps, all necessary content is at your disposal. Fully interactive, your presentation showcases best practices and follows the flow of the conversation with always-relevant content. It even delivers documents to your audience in real time. By projecting such a modern, results-driven image, you’ll be landing a sale before the presentation even wraps up.
3 – Improve Cross-selling and Upselling Practices
Promoting cross-selling or upselling within a sales department is a constant challenge for large businesses. Generally, salespersons are focussed on pushing the products and services that they’re most familiar with or that are the easiest to sell. Cross-selling and upselling can make it more difficult to secure a sale, particularly when supporting documentation is unclear or tricky to access.
These obstacles lead to lost opportunities. Often, customers don’t even realize that you offer solutions other than the ones they already rely on you for.
A content management app can solve these issues by consolidating all your sales collaterals and offering tips during crucial steps in the sales cycle. Sales tips help standardize the types of services pitched to your customers and boost your sales people confidence when discussing new products or services.
4 – Paper Costs More Than You Think
f you’re still using printed brochures, be aware of the disproportionate costs they represent. Consider:
- The high cost of quality paper and printing
- Reprinting costs due to minor tweaks
- The amount of money spent on unused brochures
- The degradation of brochures during transportation and storage
- The immeasurable cost related to outdated information that continues to circulate
- The negative perception of non-green practices
- The cost of delivering to different places of business or events
All these tangible and intangible costs are ancient history when you invest in a mobile sales app and opt for a digital library (i.e. PDF format).
5 – Minimize Employee Integration Periods
A mobile sales app simplifies the employee integration period by aggregating all sales force material onto a single tablet. The second a new employee picks up this device, everything he or she needs is instantly available (for some companies, this process can take several weeks). What’s more, a mobile sales app can include tutorials to train employees and boost sales performance.
Data reviewed from our client’s projects reveal that Beehivr makes the integration period 30 to 50-percent faster. This trend will continue as more tech-savvy millennials enter the labor market.
6 – Streamline Sales Force Communication
New products and promotions, service modifications, upgraded content: it takes time for all this information to properly disseminate.
A field sales platform lets you deploy virtually any content instantly to your entire salespeople. Get real-time results and eliminate unnecessary logistics hurdles.
7 – Control Your Image, Standardize Your Message
Effective branding goes beyond style guides. Your sales force is an everyday ambassador of your business’s identity and values.
By standardizing your sales pitch and consolidating all relevant content onto a single application, you gain better control of your own brand message. Armed with the best possible presentation practices, your sales force projects a cutting-edge and highly professional approach to doing business.
Not only does an app standardize your sales approach; it also serves as an effective analytics tool. It shows how your content is being used and when it’s most accessed. Gain insight into which content yields the best results and which sales elements are falling by the wayside. Having a solid grasp of this data lets you pinpoint the right systems and tools to keep your sales reps on track.
8 – Reduce Meeting Prep Time
Staying organized during pitches and presentations is a constant challenge for companies. Often, the sales forces are accessing a variety of documents from multiple sources. Sometimes these materials are obsolete and do not comply with marketing guidelines; other times, the proper documents can’t be found. Your sales force wastes valuable time scrambling to keep everything in order.
In fact, according to CSO Insights, salespeople are only “spending 35.9-percent of their time selling.” The rest of the time, they’re performing tedious tasks like collecting and combing through presentation content. By supporting your sales reps with a mobile app, you maximize time spent prospecting, pitching and presenting.
What’s the ROI of a Mobile Sales App?
What presentation content is most frequently used and is most useful to my sales force?
Not knowing the answer to this question is like not knowing what your best product is, or in which market your business is most successful.
To give your customers the best possible experience during the key moment of any sale – the face-to-face meeting – you must be able to analyze and improve your presentations by using the data collected from every previous pitch.
Unfortunately, PowerPoint or Keynote does not give you access to such data. You should then consider implementing a sales content management platform.