That said, one nugget of information that may well surprise you, relates to enterprise application trends and the fact that, again according to Gartner, despite this increase in popularity, the number of enterprise mobile apps being developed is not accelerating. Surprisingly, more than a quarter of enterprises globally have not built, customised or virtualised any mobile apps in the last 12 months. Astonishing stuff I know, but what must be stated is that this isn’t down to the fact that organisations don’t see the clear business benefits of mobile apps, but more so that many internal IT teams are cracking under the pressure of the businesses demand for more of them.
So, what do you do when there is a clear business need for the development of mobile applications, but your own internal IT team is suffering with a severe backlog of application work that needs doing? You call in an external team, that’s what.
One particular area of the business that would most definitely benefit from the introduction of mobile applications is the sales team. For those of you reading this article who are unaware of the multitude of business benefits that mobile applications bring to sales teams we will be hosting a webinar on 16th November that will do a deep dive into the advantages that mobile applications bring, so please feel free to join by clicking here. In the meantime, just to give you a snapshot, enterprise-grade mobile apps can equip sales teams with a set of high-impact selling tools. In addition to delivering wins in productivity and employee morale, a well-built enterprise sales app offers a distribution channel via smartphone or tablet for updated marketing collateral and sales content, ensuring that the organisation's frontline sales personnel always have the most current information at their disposal.
So, let’s take this opportunity to look at three different ways in which mobile applications can benefit your organisation:
Mobilise Legacy Systems
One of the key ways in which mobile applications can aid the sales team is through the development of a solution that dispenses with an archaic paper based system and brings your organisation kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The benefit here relates to boosting operational efficiencies through the utilisation of mobile applications to streamline internal processes within your organisation and, in turn, facilitate the improvement of the speed and quality of the information that your sales team has access to.
Access to data in real time
If being able to mobilise legacy systems has a benefit to the internal workings of your organisation, giving your sales team access to information in ‘real time’ is a sure-fire way of empowering them and arming them with up to date information. As a result, this enables them to improve their performance and productivity in front of customers.
These types of applications can feature access to product catalogues; sales presentations; meeting planners and potentially calculator tools to assist staff during client meetings. Mobile applications allow your sales team to provide better analytics to customers and provide faster feedback on products and planning.
Impress the end consumer
A further benefit of mobile applications relates to the fact that they can enable your staff to wow perspective customers. It gives them the opportunity to improve the overall customer experience by utilising mobile to show features that aren’t easy to show on a piece of paper. What we need to do is digitise content. That doesn’t mean changing content to be more mobile, but rather making new stuff that utilises mobile fully.
These are just a few of the many benefits associated with having a mobile enabled sales team. In addition to these tangible benefits comes the intangible advantage of having salespeople who will be delighted that you have made their lives easier. And everybody knows that a happy, organised, and aligned sales team is worth its weight in gold. As I alluded to earlier, I’ll be discussing this topic in greater detail in an upcoming webinar, please feel free to register here and join the conversation.
