Take your Salesforce CRM mobile capabilities to the next level.
What’s the best way to put mobile CRM tools in the hands of your salespeople or field service teams?
Finding the best answer for your business starts with this question: What are you trying to achieve from your mobile CRM project? Answering that will help you identify the business goals that your project should support. Only then do we recommend that you plan your mobile CRM project, and then find the best technology for the job.
Mobile CRM Enables Three Business Outcomes
When identifying business outcomes to target, know that all CRM projects can achieve only three outcomes: better growth, efficiency and/or customer experience.
What types of business outcomes do companies typically pursue, via mobile CRM? Cloud Sherpas senior mobility consultant Ryan Northington offers the following examples, drawn from the efforts of a single Cloud Sherpas customer — one of the world’s best-known food manufacturers — which is pursuing multiple mobile CRM projects:
Growth: Capture New/Emerging Markets
People often think of CRM in terms of making salespeople more productive, for example by enabling them to enter contact and account information while on the go. But people don’t always look at how mobile CRM can help businesses break into emerging markets.
For example, mobile CRM is helping the food manufacturer open new markets in regions where field sales teams may literally pedal a bike with an attached cooler — or drive a small, refrigerated truck — from store to store, restocking highly perishable products as they go. Accordingly, the food manufacturer has been designing an iPhone and Android app for salespeople to help them navigate to stores, and predict which ones will offer the greatest revenue opportunities, as well as locate the nearest supplier when they need to replenish products.
Efficiency: Free Salespeople To Sell
For more established markets, meanwhile, the same food manufacturer has been designing a smartphone app for its field service teams, which identifies the most efficient route between locations that need to be restocked with products, as well as lets them take stock on the premises, without using a clipboard and keying it in later. It’s the same idea as above, but in a more mature market, the best benefits typically come by focusing on increased efficiency — more than growth — because you can help field service personnel make the best use of their time, while reducing data-capture errors and required rework.
Customer Experience: Connect With Mobile Devices
Moving forward, the packaged food manufacturer is evaluating the use of iPad apps to enable field personnel to demonstrate all current products and promotions to store owners. Imagine, for example, if the field rep could walk into a 7-Eleven or other convenience store and use an iPad to sell the owner on upcoming promotions and new products. By relaying information in a more customer-consumable manner, the business hopes to increase stores’ uptake of its product and gain a greater share of valuable shelf space, thus helping increase revenue.
Plan Your Attack: Mobility Workshop
What’s the best way to move forward with mobility projects? Cloud Sherpas offers a rapid Mobility Workshop to help CRM project teams identify — with input from all stakeholders — the business outcomes they should be targeting. We then help set the project scope and define requirements, design high-level wireframes, identify a proposed technical approach and produce budget and timeframe estimates. As a result, businesses have an action plan for putting new, high-impact mobile CRM capabilities in place.
Through our Mobility Workshop, for example, we helped one of the world’s largest life insurance companies design a mobile application that enables salespeople to spend more time interacting with customers. Previously, salespeople — who are really consultants, meeting with people in their living rooms to identify the best life insurance, savings or other financial product for their needs — had to rely on a clunky, PC-based application that required extensive data input.
Soon, however, salespeople will have an iPad app that enables them to spend less time keying in data — thanks to ties into the company’s Salesforce CRM system — and thus allows them to spend more time interacting with customers. The result, much more than simply “going mobile,” will be measured in business outcomes: increased sales efficiency and a better customer experience.
Learn More
Cloud Sherpas is one of the world’s leading cloud services brokerages and helps businesses adopt, manage and enhance their CRM investment by identifying desired business goals, finding the right tools and technology for the job, and delivering rapid implementations that remain focused on achieving the desired business capabilities.
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Steve Jurvetson.
