For full functionality of this publication it is necessary to enable Javascript.

For many field sales representatives, CRM is a burden. After a long day of selling, they have to enter information from the day’s calls and appointments, culled from hastily scribbled notes, into their company’s CRM system. Once entered, that same information is hard to utilize to quickly prepare for calls, making the data more beneficial to the sales manager than to the rep. “It’s hard to open your laptop in between meetings. If you don’t do it right after, you think you’re going to do it at night or over the weekend, then you don’t, and before long, you’re not entering anything at all,” says Nilay Patel, a former salesperson and the cofounder and CEO of Selligy, a producer of a mobile sales tool. “The life of a salesperson…is hard. They have relationships to manage, deals they’re tracking, bosses that want updates on deals, and end-of-quarter stress,” observes Andy Byrne, CEO of mobile CRM tool provider Clari. 

Meanwhile, inside sales representatives have long had access to a wealth of customer data in their CRM systems. They have a knowledge base that allows them to share content and tools to figure out who to call next. Data pops up as needed, and information can be entered after a call. When tied to the task, CRM is more successful. Smartphones and tablets, which are now commonplace, can perform those same functions for mobile sales reps. “Mobile allows [field] salespeople to interact with the system around the event you’d want them to interact with,” says Robert DeSisto, vice president and distinguished sales analyst at Gartner.

The early adopters of mobile CRM are equally mobile sales forces, who need access to client and product information on the go, before, during, and after their meetings. “Salespeople have been the earliest adopters of mobile going back to the car phone in the late eighties,” observes Chuck Ganapathi, who created Salesforce.com’s Chatter and is founder and CEO of mobile CRM provider Tactile. Laptops were similarly transformational, but lack the portability of a smartphone or a tablet that can stand in for a clipboard for sales material.

Sales force automation for smartphones and tablets, while in its early stages, is on the radar of most sales teams. When it comes to mobile CRM, “we’re definitely immature,” DeSisto says. Most enterprises venturing into the space have “ad hoc” implementations. DeSisto sees the greatest success for apps “that are task-driven, focused on the task someone’s trying to accomplish,” which translates to specific apps designed around a salesperson’s behavior before, during, and after sales calls. 

To arm their salespeople with mobile tools, some sales executives have opted for custom mobile solutions, while others are turning to their traditional CRM vendors for mobile-first solutions focused on specific tasks, mostly related to the sales process. Other salespeople are heading off on their own, often finding free sales tools that help them, and boasting about them to the rest of their team. With this freemium model, salespeople adopt the tool and vendors use that adoption to sell the premium version to the enterprise. 

Mobile CRM vendors are not only disrupting traditional enterprise selling models, they’re also offering to solve some of CRM’s biggest problems, according to DeSisto. “The idea is that [mobile tools will] one, improve adoption, and two, [allow managers to] get better data quality from the rep,” DeSisto says. Mobile CRM “can also reduce the latency in communication reps have with the rest of the organization,” he adds.Mobile CRM’s potential to solve these enduring problems may be the biggest selling point of all.

A Number of Choices

When choosing what kind of mobile CRM to leverage, there are generally three options: the mobile version of your CRM solution, a custom solution, or a mobile-first vendor. In the first category, Salesforce1, which came on the scene last year at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce, is the most splashy recent entry, though virtually every other vendor, from Oracle to SugarCRM, has a mobile solution as well. These solutions can enable mobile entry and data retrieval. The downside is that they’re designed to do everything from quoting to service to sales, instead of specializing in one area. This can make the apps less helpful for people who want a powerful solution designed around a single use case, such as field sales.

In the case of Salesforce1, the solution also serves as a hub for other solutions. Companies such as NewVoiceMedia, which provides contact center solutions, can create specific apps built on the platform. A sales rep making calls remotely can do so while logging her calls and making her data accessible to her manager. “If you’re a sales rep and live in Oklahoma and your manager lives in Texas, as you do the outbound calls through the Salesforce1 app, the length of call, conversation, [and] who you talked to are tracked in the contact record, so now the manager has visibility in that record. This enables the mobile workforce,” says Monica Girolami, head of North America marketing for NewVoiceMedia.

The second option is to create an app unique to the company using it. According to Jim Dickie, managing partner of CSO Insights, many sales organizations are turning to companies that develop mobile apps, such as MicroStrategy, to map the app’s features to the company’s sales processes as well as its need for custom fields. In this category, many are building features such as routing software, which helps sales reps figure out how to order their sales calls or receive alternate selections for a sales call if someone is too busy for a meeting. Companies tying complex business processes to their apps often choose this option for a variety of reasons; one reason might be to give their sales force access to back-office inventory systems so they only push products in stock.

The third category, which is brimming with newcomers, is the mobile-first sales application. These tools, which include Clari, Selligy, and Tact, have raised millions in venture capital. They work on top of existing CRM applications, especially market share leader Salesforce.com, and tend to have a particular focus on providing a compelling, user-friendly experience, while recognizing the necessity of capturing quality CRM data. Before a meeting, users can look up contact information and details about an opportunity. Afterward, they can update details in the CRM system. While salespeople answer emails, take phone calls, or look at their to-do list on the go, they do so within the app that also plugs into the CRM system. That improves data quality and, in turn, makes CRM more helpful to salespeople. There are also apps that leverage mobile devices to bring information into the sales meeting, helping marketing see what content is helpful and allowing companies to track how information is digested after the sales call.

Taking Advantage of What’s Intrinsically Mobile

The wrong way to go about mobile CRM is to simply move all functionality from a desktop system to a mobile system, Gartner’s DeSisto cautions. It would be excessive and ignore all the unique properties of mobile technology. Instead, he advises sales application managers to focus on task-driven mobile applications that consider what a salesperson’s day looks like and design features to help them sell and be more productive. The challenge is “identifying new processes that mobility can enable versus automating existing processes that may now be outdated,” DeSisto writes in the report “Mobile Devices Are a Major Disrupter for Sales Applications.”

To increase adoption, companies are already providing applications that cater to users’ existing mobile technology habits. For instance, many people check their phone first thing in the morning. Clari organizes its tasks around a rep’s day, greeting him with a “good morning” and showing him relevant emails, appointments, and news articles and social media posts affecting his business.

Selligy’s app knows when the mobile device is stationary or moving, and uses that to decide when to push the end-of-meeting questionnaire. For example, if a meeting is scheduled from 3:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. and the user hasn’t moved by 4:00 p.m., it won’t show up. Once it picks up on movement, a likely sign the meeting is over, the sales rep will receive a push notification asking her to fill out a survey, allowing her to quickly update the system in the elevator or during the walk to her car.

Insightly takes advantage of the camera feature, enabling users to snap a photo and attach it to the record. Its app, like many others, lets users click to call or text from within the app, allowing them to launch a new program without toggling to another first. 

Many mobile applications will launch a maps application from the contact or calendar screen. Selligy’s app goes a step further, and lets a user know just how many minutes he has before he needs to depart for his next meeting. 

Mobile, unlike laptops, comprehends context, and has more potential to understand the actions and behavior of its users. Gartner calls this “cognizant computing,” and predicts that technology providers that “adapt their strategy to exploit this will generate new revenue, find new ways to differentiate themselves, and foster engagement via mobile apps,” according to a May 2014 report by analysts Andrew Chetham and Jessica Ekholm. Mobile CRM may not have all the functionality of a desktop system, but its ability to use context can aid in gathering more data and improving the productivity of the salesperson. 

Mobile for Sales Content

Tablets are sleek and impressive, and they’re also an excellent place for salespeople to turn when they’re stumped or need to answer a question correctly to comply with regulations. “Mobile is the answer to the problem ‘I don’t have the resources with me on the call.’ We’re asking salespeople to go out and sell at the speed of change. There are changes to the economy, customer expectations, new products/enhancements, and we inflict change on top of that. So how do salespeople keep up?” Dickie asks. One way is by arming reps with mobile devices filled with product information, inventory, and other materials to keep them from getting stuck on a call. The content space includes tools such as Savo, Brainshark, Clear-slide, MobilePoint, and Showpad.

Mobile-first solution Showpad puts marketing materials at salespeople’s fingertips to help them sell. It also gives marketing teams insight into what materials are actually useful during sales meetings. The company, which has more than 500 customers, has seen particularly strong traction in manufacturing, where salespeople may not have in-depth knowledge of all the SKUs its company sells, and life sciences, where they are restricted in the types of claims they make. The app was developed with the consumer experience in mind. “The goal, at the end of the day, is to make a salesperson’s job easier. They really want to have all the capabilities at their desk out in the field, and do as little admin work as possible,” says Julie Zisman, Showpad’s head of marketing. She touts 60 to 80 percent adoption rates for the tablet and smartphone-based app. 

Tablets can do more than impress prospects; they can increase the confidence of the reps themselves. “Salespeople sell what they’re comfortable selling. They don’t know what questions people will ask, or all the information about the competitors. By putting that into [content apps], you’ll make salespeople comfortable selling products, they’ll do it more, and you’ll get better [new] product adoption,” Zisman says.

Winning Over the End User First

Enterprise software is becoming more like consumer software, and there’s nowhere this is more apparent than in mobile apps. On a desktop, enterprise software developers can keep adding features, but that simply isn’t possible on a mobile device. They are also building apps in environments designed not just for enterprises, but for consumers as well. Developers of iPhone apps work off Apple’s guidelines, which are designed to ensure simple, user-friendly experiences. 

 “You can no longer get away with clunky business apps,” says Jesse Gibbs, senior product manager at Insightly. “It’s becoming the expectation that apps where you have to refer to a manual are no longer acceptable, and that used to be the norm.” Insightly, which targets small businesses that don’t have much time to learn systems, made sure to pare down its offerings on its mobile app. “Our goal is to not necessarily replicate everything on the Web site,” Gibbs says. Instead the developer chooses which features might be most valuable to users on the go.

“Hiding complexity [is] the hardest part of getting mobile CRM right. You can’t ignore the complexity, because you won’t end up with the data the organization needs. And you can’t show the complexity to the user, because he just won’t use it,” says Chris van Loben Sels, Selligy’s director of business development and marketing.

Many of these mobile-first companies aren’t just designing for the end user, they’re also selling to the end user. “I’ve been in CRM for a long time, and it’s always frustrated me that the end users of the product, whether it’s Siebel or Salesforce.com, never liked the products we sold. They were built for the needs of the company, and purchased by the company. That’s why you see the low adoption rates of enterprise software in general, and CRM is the worst offender,” Tactile’s Ganapathi says. His company’s app, Tact, is available for free in Apple’s App Store. The app has spread organically through organizations, starting with one user and growing to dozens in the same organization, “without making any effort to pitch the product to them,” he says. The company expects to sell its app in the same model as Box.com, which offers a free version and then upsells to enterprises trying to add features and security to the cloud storage system. “We think this is the future of business applications,” he says.

Selligy takes a similar approach, offering a free version to an individual user available in the App Store. Enterprise accounts cost from $40 to $75 per user, per month, but include features such as forecasting and the ability to update custom fields that appeal to enterprises.

Clari, which offers a free trial of its app through its Web site, is chasing after potential enterprise accounts with added features sales managers can use with the data they’re receiving from their mobile workforce. “We’re seeing CEOs and CFOs are arguably as addicted to the experience as the reps are, because it’s so simple for them to engage and see where things stand with deals,” Clari’s Byrne says.

Designing for the end user and selling to the end user both flip traditional enterprise models on their head. DeSisto, though, is not completely convinced this “land and expand” model will work for all sales apps, noting that he has plenty of free versions of apps he finds perfectly useful without upgrading to paid versions. While that may be true for an individual salesperson, it’s not necessarily true for a team. “The value for the enterprise comes from adoption across the entire team. It gives them new visibility. The upsell from a couple of people to a whole team unleashes value,” van Loben Sels says.

The Future of Mobile CRM

Done right, mobile CRM promises to improve the quality and amount of data salespeople are entering into their CRM system. It gives managers visibility into what’s going on in the field, and enables them to connect those same reps back to the office with better marketing materials or details about an account from another department. “Our view is that CRM is the backbone upon which people are running their businesses,” Byrne says of Clari. “We seek to complement and get more out of that CRM system.” Mobile CRM’s benefits are myriad, but for NewVoiceMedia’s Girolami, the end benefit is not for businesses, but those they serve. “It gives the business more insight, and you’re going to give the customer a better experience.”  

Contact the editor at editor@destinationcrm.com.