Like all of us, salespeople love using their smartphone or tablet. They’re easy to use, quick to access (no boot up time), and have a friendly format. We’ve all seen salespeople lean in with their customers over their tablets, building a better rapport while sharing materials that help them better sell their value propositions. But for many sales people just having a mobile device isn’t enough – their companies are not equipping them with the right materials to be productive, or in a manner they can easily find and access. According to Kapost, 65% of sales people can’t find content to share with their customers, and most find that they are not engaging their customer with content when they meet them face to face.
To optimise success, salespeople need to be able to present and share the right content with the right customer at the right point inside the sales cycle.
The traditional IT-driven approach has been to provide secure access to email, web browsing and possibly access to the company file repository – and then leaving it salespeople to “search and surf” to find what they think they might need. This approach doesn’t fit with the way salespeople work – resulting in many salespeople are pushed back to their laptops to work with their customers, with awkward moments while they search for content to match the discussion flow. And no ROI from their companies purchasing all those mobile devices.
So perhaps it’s time for a new way of thinking, where the focus of the marketing and sales enablement team is to ensure that the salespeople just open their mobile devices and have all the information and content they need to do their job, automatically available for them to use on and off line. Instead of searching and surfing, salespeople can simply view, edit, annotate, share and collaborate with their customers directly from their smartphone or tablet.
Embracing this new way of working, rather than pushing people back to their traditional ways, can have a big impact on the way companies run their sales teams. Now they can encourage the salespeople to spend more time directly working with customers and presenting right off their devices. And with the power of modern mobile enablement tools like bigtincan’s hub product, the way they salespeople work is tracked and monitored, resulting in a smart AI being able to make recommendations about what the salesperson should do next – resulting in a significant advantage for both new sales people (who are now given a leg up on how to do their job) and existing teams who get real world recommendations and suggestions based on how the top performers in their group work. And the people back in Marketing and Sales Enablement get real data to measure the effectiveness of their content, helping them to ask the right questions to salespeople as they evolve their content.
All makes sense, and is all set to grow. According to Gartner almost 20% of U.S. sales organizations use tablets as primary mobile platform. This number is expected to grow, and CSO Insights says that the leaders in the field are spending an average of $2,500 per sales rep for enablement software to drive productivity.
So no matter whether you are a marketer, sales manager, sales ops, IT or executive management, embracing mobility for the sales team can result in increased number of sales cycles (as search and surf time shrinks), improved win rates (better engagement with the right content at the right time), better customer satisfaction (as salespeople tune their presentations to directly address the customers’ business goals), and a more efficiently running sales team. It’s not difficult to achieve — there are a number of tools that make the migration to a mobile-first sales team something that the salespeople will love as much as they love their Instagram account. Or more.
You can find out for yourself – get a demo of Bigtincan.
